Bold Sons of Erin

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  I considered the great, big bulk of him, in his vigor and his pride. His dark suit fit him to a fancy, yet somehow seemed too small to contain his fullness. There was nothing still about him and, despite his business reverses, we all sensed that Franklin Benjamin Gowen was a fellow with a future. I will give him that. He was but twenty-six or twenty-seven then, handsome and already a good doer at table. Rumored to have great plans he was, although few of us were sure of his direction. An Orangeman by ancestry, he attended the Episcopal Church that stood near his office. Twas the proper church for those with high ambitions, and the best address in town, although I am content to go to chapel.

  And yet, for all his high-church ways, Mr. Gowen had chosen to represent the Copperhead Democrats, and the Breckinridge faction, at that. He drew his ballots from Irish Catholic miners, from German farmers unhappy with the war. He had that Irish gift of talk, when he did not speak in anger, but hard it was to pin down what he said. Later, of course, he would make a great career, as all the nation knows, building the Reading Railroad to a spectacular bankruptcy. He was the man who hanged the Mollie Maguires, the guilty and the innocent alike, and I would play a role in that sad travesty.

  We could not have foreseen his future during the war, since young Gowen seemed committed to the Irish. But he would be the one to lay them low, for loyalty was not among his virtues. The poor devils were but his stepping stones to power. He fought for them when he needed them, and against them when he did not.

  He loved books and literary evenings. But he did not much like men.

  “Nothing but damned trouble,” Mr. Gowen said sharply, without specifying the object of his scorn. This time, he shut his fist around his watch.

  I shall always remember young Mr. Gowen the way he appeared that day. So strong and brisk and confident. As if he had been born to rule the world. I knew the fellow thought little of me, for I had been but a clerk in a coal company countinghouse before the war took all of us in thrall. I was a small man, though an honest one. I wanted only a quiet life, with my darling wife and our son—and now young Fanny, my ward—with chapel on Sunday, morning and evening both. But war will have its way with every man.

  Mr. Gowen, as we all knew, had bought himself out of danger from the draft, although his brother served with our 48th. Mr. Gowen had explained that he could not serve the colors, although it was his fervent wish to do so, because of family and business obligations.

  He had ambitions that the war annoyed.

  I sat and let him speak his anger out, for I was weary and did not want a scrap. After my return to Pottsville from the boneyard, I had gone home in the dray-cart hours of morning to set my uniform to soak in the tub in the yard. Fanny woke and wanted to help—she always sensed me near—but I did not want her to touch the leavings of death. Orphaned, she had seen enough at fourteen years.

  And I thought, again, in the almost light, of the odd woman in the trees. Of the vileness of her doings with my fingers. If Mrs. Boland was not mad, her actions were all the worse for her wicked sanity. Twas not a matter I meant to share with anyone.

  Fanny had a smile for me, as Fanny always did. She stayed out in the cold to keep me company. All quiet like. I had a soft spot for her that, curiously, my Mary did not share. But I will speak of that at the proper time.

  Fanny slept in the kitchen then and always rose with the larks. The lass had been a lark of sorts in Glasgow. She perched and watched me in the morning gray, wrapped in a shawl my Mary had cast off, with her mass of ginger hair awaiting the dawn. She did not pester me with queries, but always was content to see me near, no matter my doings. At last, I sent her into the house to get up the morning fire. I had to wash before my dear wife rose.

  I did not want my Mary or young John to smell the death on me. It carries a contagion, see. I do not mean the contagion of disease, but a contagion of the heart. I did not wish to bring death into my house. I tolerate no hint of superstition, but my Mary Myfanwy was in the family way, thanks to our blessed visit late in the spring, and even the soundest Methodist fears ill luck. I wished to keep the hard world from our threshold, to banish death through prayer and will and love.

  And my son was already frightened of me, his rarity of a father, and of the new scar set upon my cheek during my recent sojourn in Her Majesty’s kingdom. Our John was not yet two, but old enough he was to fear a stranger. And cruel war makes strangers of us all.

  After a proper breakfast, with my Mary not quite content with my explanations, young John antic, and Fanny quiet and watchful, I enjoyed my daily interlude with the Bible, then took myself along to the county offices, to seek both Mr. Gowen and the sheriff. I wished a local writ to return and dig up that grave proper by light of day, for there was murder and mischief in those doings. But the sheriff had been detained at home, enchanted by his blankets, and the ancient clerk in the courthouse explained that Mr. Gowen might be found at his private offices, pursuing the business of law. A district attorney’s list of clients swells.

  I marched back down along Centre Street, which was still a black muck from a rainfall days before. Hats aplenty tipped to me as I tapped my way along, for I have a good report among my fellows. As I chanced by, Mrs. Wesendonck applied for assistance in locating her cat, implying it had been carried off by the Rebels, and she was not pleased when I explained that the federal government don’t pursue stray animals. But then she is a German, and they are a stubborn folk. Mr. Yuengling’s brewery wagons churned the length of the street, hauling sin in barrels, and the clang of unseen railyards sang of profits. The smoke from the Palo Alto mills and from our brace of ironworks invaded the sky, which was hard and blue and cold. A ragamuffin boy cried to his comrades, “Aw, ga wan wit cha! Youz don’ know nuttin’, yuz don’t,” warming me with the melodious speech of the native-born Pottsvillean.

  Mr. Gowen was in his office, indeed, which had a fine location at the hub of things, just along from the Pennsylvania Hall Hotel, our city’s finest, and across the street from the offices of Mr. Bannon’s Miners’ Journal, the newspaper of Mr. Lincoln’s party and the one we took at home.

  I had barely uttered my business to Mr. Gowen’s clerk, who looked as though he suffered from obstinate bowels, when the door to Mr. Gowen’s office opened and two fellows come galloping out. I recognized Mr. Heckscher, the great colliery owner. He was companioned by a foreigner. And when I put it thus, it tells you something, for we have all the nations of the world, or thereabouts, in Schuylkill County. At least all those which are civilized. When a fellow looks foreign in Pottsville, he strikes you queer.

  This one had a narrow face, like an axe-head viewed straight on, and dainty little mustaches, flat as if painted. His waistcoat and tie flashed silken hues from east of the English Channel. He looked a grand sort, though not an especially good one.

  “Ah, Monsieur,” he said to Mr. Heckscher, who did not note my greeting, “the method . . . it is not important, you understand. Only that the thing has been done at last. C’est vrai?”

  Now, you will say: “That fellow was a Frenchman.” But I will tell you: The devil spoke French, and English, too, but neither had been the first tongue that come to his cradle. His English pronunciation was too fine, and his French intonation was insufficiently rude. I could not begin to make the stranger out.

  I let the matter go past me, for I had more important things on my mind than dandified Europeans and their commerce. I thought instead of Heckschersville, where I had spent a muchness of the night. And where a dead and nameless girl lay buried. Where a general had been killed. The mining patch had Mr. Heckscher’s name, but he was too wise and rich to live in it. Rich men lived in Pottsville. Or in Reading, or Philadelphia. The patches were home to the poor, and to foremen and superintendents who slept with loaded pistols by their beds. Heckschersville was known as the worst and most commotive settlement in wild Cass Township, where even the mice were Irish and Union blue found less of a welcome than famine. But it sat atop one of the richest veins of
anthracite in the county. The Irish may have hated the man, but they made Mr. Heckscher a fortune.

  Of course, I did not connect the presence of Mr. Heckscher and his odd companion to my own doings, for coal bosses are uncommonly fond of barristers. They spend more time in chambers than in collieries, and what they cannot take with a pickaxe, they take with a judge’s writ. I do not speak of Mr. Evans, my dear wife’s uncle and my employer before the war, who ran a model establishment near equal in its qualities to the works of Mr. Johns of Saint Clair town. Mr. Evans it was who invited my bride and myself to come to America, when we were newly married but unlucky, with my Indian disgrace hanging over my head.

  I always thought Mr. Evans a good man, and a just one. He paid fair wages and measured with honest scales. He let no drunkards into his mines. He used the stoutest timbers in his gangways, nor did he rob old pillars to the danger-point. His deepest breasts and galleries had proper ventilation, and but a few workmen were killed or maimed each year. His coal was clean, and known in Philadelphia. Like Mr. Johns, his fellow Welshman, he stood a very model of Christian probity. Although he had become a Congregationalist, for reasons of his own, I always believed his heart remained with Methodism.

  Yet, there was more to come of Mr. Evans. That was the autumn when my heart was crushed.

  As the street door slammed behind Mr. Heckscher and his fancy companion, I introduced myself anew to Mr. Gowen, who was ruffled and found my visit unwelcome from the first. He bid me sit down, politely though impatiently, but when I had barely begun to describe my petition, the fellow exploded in anger.

  He called me names, which is a childish thing.

  And yet, I like to remember him the way he was that day, a confident young man. With his future all before him and our little city enlivened by modern war’s appetite for coal. He seemed a man for our times, did Mr. Gowen. Our Navy’s ships fed the highest grade of Schuylkill White Ash Lump Steamboat into their boilers, at four-dollars-and-ninety-cents the ton, wholesale and government rate. We had been in a frightful slump before Fort Sumter was attacked, but the foundries and forges, the ships and locomotives, and all the great steam engines that increase the devastation of modern war demanded the one thing our county had to offer. We had entered the Age of Coal, which I predict will last a hundred years. Fortunes were being made between lunch and dinner, although intemperate men might still go bust.

  I like to remember Mr. Gowen the way he was that morning, despite his sour demeanor toward myself. He seemed fit to conquer the world. And, in his time, he nearly did. It took all of J.P. Morgan’s might to bring him and his Reading Railroad down. But that was far in the future, the stuff of high finance and not of war. It is better to recall Mr. Gowen hopeful and hale, in 1862, than as I would find him in the Year of Our Lord 1889, dead by his own hand in a Washington hotel room.

  But let that bide.

  “DAMN IT, Jones, are you even listening to me?” I thought he would pound the desk with his fist, but Mr. Gowen did not. Instead, he took out his watch, then put it back.

  “Yes, Mr. Gowen. It is listening I am.”

  And listening I was. But I had decided to let him blow his steam. Although I am Welsh born and talk is our cakes and ale, I have learned that there is often a great deal to be said for not saying a great deal.

  “Well, I want to know just what you thought you were doing by sneaking up there in the dead of night to dig up the grave of one of our citizens?”

  “Was he a citizen, Mr. Gowen? This Daniel Patrick Boland who was not in his grave?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, then, I will tell you. It seems young Mr. Boland voted, as a proper citizen should, for his name is listed on the county rolls. I have examined them, see. And I suspect he voted the Democratic ticket. But when the commissioner attempted to register the men of Cass Township for the draft, it appears young Mr. Boland remembered that he was not a citizen, after all, and thereby was not liable for the draft.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I am not ‘implying,’ Mr. Gowen. I have only asked you a question.”

  “No. No, I don’t believe that quite. I think you’re suggesting electoral fraud. Well, I’ll have you know that I won this position by one-thousand, six-hundred and thirty votes, the largest majority of any candidate in this county.”

  “I did not suggest misconduct. Look you. I have only asked after Mr. Boland’s citizenship. Since you are so concerned with the lot of citizens.”

  I know I should have shunned all confrontation. I needed to gather allies, not to make enemies. The truth is that I was peeved, and worn, and even good John Wesley had his pride. If Mr. Gowen believed that he must condescend to me, he still might have shown regard for our country’s uniform. His own brother would die in Union blue before the war’s end.

  As to our recent elections, well, I fear that fraud is the stepchild of democracy. Oh, the counting of ballots is no common arithmetic. Yet, to be fair, Mr. Gowen had won his place beyond a drunkard’s challenge. Although he had not won a majority in Pottsville, where the people are sensible.

  “What’s your point, Jones?” Mr. Gowen asked. “You still owe me an explanation. By whose authority did you open that grave?”

  I sighed and sat me back. Twas then I reached deep into my uniform—a fresh frock coat, mind, not the one I had dirtied. I had transferred one bit of paper to my clean get-up, a letter carefully preserved in a wallet of oilskin. Its signature was my armor.

  I handed the letter across the piled desk.

  He swept the document from my hand and glanced over it as he stood. Then he sat down hard and read it through. He did not raise his eyes a single time. But his lips moved, as if he must taste the words to judge their power.

  At last, he looked up. He stared at me. Pale he was, although by nature florid.

  “This is infamous,” he said.

  “By the power invested in me by the President of these United States,” I told him, “I forbid you to speak of the contents of that letter with any man.”

  He let the letter drop to his desk, then shook his head in anguish. When he spoke his voice was chastened, wounded and low.

  “And he calls that democracy, does he?” He gave a little puff, but could not work up his old steam. “What, are we living in a new age of lettres de cachet? When an innocent man might find himself hurled into prison? At the whim of his political enemies?” He looked at me then, with that coldness I would come to know too well, that self-regard that would drive men to the gallows. “He’s thrown away habeus corpus. Now it appears the man’s trampling the rest of the Constitution.”

  “Mr. Lincoln,” I began, in a voice too much the schoolmaster’s, “is doing what he must to save our Union. Like you, he has read the law and knows his doings. And I will tell you, Mr. Gowen: I will not hear a word spoken against him.”

  “He’s becoming a damnable tyrant, if you ask me. Why, look how little appreciation he shows to George McClellan. The ape’s as jealous as a caesar.”

  “That is enough, now. As for your habeus corpus, I may not have my Latin or my Greek, but I know what it means. If you are so intent upon producing bodies, how is it you object to my inspection of that grave?”

  He sighed. “Don’t you see, Jones? I simply want to keep order. Cripes. That’s what I was elected to do. These people of ours . . . these Irish miners and laborers . . . they’ve come here looking for honest wages, not for a war. Certainly not to squander their meager lives to free the nigger. Oh, I’m all for preserving the Union, you understand. I’m as patriotic as the next man. I wish circumstances had permitted me to serve under the colors. It doesn’t take a prophet to see that we’re all better off with one continental market, rather than with a country split in two. Let us hope for a negotiated settlement among reasonable men. But the Southrons do have a point, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to the rights of the states. And, I might add, the rights of the individual citizen.”

 
He got a little air back into his lungs. “Look here. The Union needs the coal that these men dig. The government can find soldiers elsewhere, but not skilled miners. Why stir up trouble with this draft nonsense when they’re already doing their part for the Union by digging our coal? You know well enough what this county’s been through this year. Work stoppages. Pumps laid idle, productive mines flooded. Good men driven to bankruptcy, when every other business is booming. All because of Washington’s interference. Federal intransigence, the heavy hand of Washington, has nearly driven this county into open rebellion.”

  He rose, heavily, to his feet again. After all, he was a politician. Such men declaim when other men but speak. The vigor was drained out of him, though, the spunk gone. “If cooler heads had not prevailed, we might have had our own civil war right here in Schuylkill County, this very autumn. When hundreds of—nay, a thousand—miners stop work at their collieries to march to intercept a troop train and riot to set the recruits free, then I’d say we had come to the very brink of insurrection.”

  “And,” I put in, as he paused for breath, “I believe the cooler head that prevailed was Mr. Lincoln’s.”

  Mr. Gowen dismissed the thought, measuring the weight of his pocket watch yet again. “It was McClure. McClure and Andy Curtin. Pennsylvania men. They may be Republicans, but they know their constituencies. McClure knew what he was facing. I’m quite certain he gave Lincoln his marching orders.”

  It did not happen that way, for I was there for much of the desperate doings. Forgive me the sin of pride. Mr. McClure, who is a great political fellow of ours, explained the situation to Mr. Lincoln, how the miners had chased off the draft registrars and destroyed the records, and how all Cass Township was up in arms and refused to go to the war. Hotheads had put it into their ears that, after they were packed off to die, freed slaves would be sent down the mines at starvation wages. Twas a great lie, but lies abound in wartime. They satisfy the ear displeased by truth.