Lincoln and the Irish Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Niall O’Dowd.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  ISBN: 978-1-5107-3634-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3635-1

  Printed the United States of America

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: “WRITE WHAT SHOULD NOT BE FORGOTTEN”

  CHAPTER ONE: Scoop of the Century

  CHAPTER TWO: Mary and Abe and Their Irish Maids

  CHAPTER THREE: Lincoln on Robert Emmet and the Irish Struggle

  CHAPTER FOUR: Lincoln’s Near Duel to the Death with an Irish Rival

  CHAPTER FIVE: Lincoln’s New Party, Anti-Irish and Anti-Slavery

  CHAPTER SIX: Lincoln Takes an Axe Handle to the Irish

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Irish, Douglass, and Lincoln in the 1860 Election

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Lincoln’s Irish White House Circle

  CHAPTER NINE: Lincoln’s Love for Irish Ballads Displayed

  CHAPTER TEN: Two Irish Become the First Casualties of the Civil War

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Three Men Convince the Irish to Fight for Lincoln: Thomas Francis Meagher

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Fighting for Lincoln: The Irish Archbishop

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Fighting for Lincoln: General Michael Corcoran

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Lincoln’s Unexpected Heroes

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Lincoln’s Irish Soldiers—Captured by the Rebels

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Man They Couldn’t Kill—The Irish Medal of Honor Winners

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: General Shields, Former Dueling Partner, Declares for Lincoln

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Taking on Stonewall Jackson, the Rebel Avenger

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Gettysburg, the Gap of Danger

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Father Corby Summons God—The Draft Riots Cometh

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The President Pardons Some Irish, Not Others

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Fear of Black/Irish Coupling Derails Lincoln Support

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The South Seeks to Stop Irish Migration

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Off the Boat and Into the Arms of the Union

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: In Ireland, Father Bannon Wins Friends for the Rebels’ Cause

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: General Phil Sheridan, the Little Big Fighter

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Ford’s Theatre—What Might Have Been

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: The Co-Conspirators—A Catholic Plot?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Irishmen Seeking the Killer Booth

  CHAPTER THIRTY: Edward Doherty Gets His Man

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Lincoln and the Irish—Linked Forever

  EPILOGUE: Kennedy Retraces Lincoln and Gettysburg

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To Debbie, for all your love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Let me start where it all begins, with family and friends, co-workers, editors, proofreaders, sales staff at Irish Voice, Irish Central, Irish America, and Irish Studio.

  To believers, too numerous to mention.

  To Dermot McEvoy, for outstanding editing and insights and introductions.

  To Michael Campbell at Skyhorse, for initiative, advice, and counsel.

  To 40 million Irish Americans, for a wonderful community that has always given back to me.

  To Damian Shiels, whose outstanding writing about the Civil War Irish first grabbed my attention.

  To Jim McManus, Civil War Irish expert, for invaluable research and information.

  To Abraham Lincoln, for saving democracy.

  To the Irish, for helping him.

  Beir Bua Sibh Go Leir

  INTRODUCTION

  “Write What Should Not Be Forgotten”

  “Write what should not be forgotten,” advises Chilean American author Isabel Allende. With that in mind, I began this book about how the Irish were a huge part of Abraham Lincoln’s life and successes.

  There have been 15,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln, more than on anyone in history, bar Jesus Christ. This is the only one that focuses specifically on the Lincoln-Irish connection. There have been many books on the Irish and the Civil War, but not specifically on Lincoln and his relationship with them.

  It has been a remarkable omission.

  Lincoln’s rise coincided with the one million famine-tossed Irish flooding to America’s shores, when the population of the US was only 23 million. 150,000 Irish fought for his Union. Without them, he would almost certainly have lost.

  As the war news turned against them, the Confederates mounted desperate attempts to stop the Union from recruiting in Ireland in order to try and level the battlefield. They knew how important those Irish soldiers were.

  Only in the first World War did more Irish ever fight for a cause together, and yet for too long there has been silence and minimal acknowledgment. Selective amnesia has occurred not just in America but in Ireland, about the men and women (yes, there were women) from Ireland who fought in the Civil War and supported Lincoln.

  The role of the 25,000 who fought for the Confederacy has to be acknowledged too, as well as the many pro-slavery Irish clerics and their flocks.

  But the Irish were everywhere in Lincoln’s life, and not just as warriors. They nannied his kids, comforted his distressed wife, and Irish patriot Robert Emmet informed his political passion. He sang their songs, repeated their jokes, imitated their accents, and even came within minutes of fighting a duel with an Irish political opponent, which he later admitted was one of the lowest times of his life.

  Once he got to the White House, he surrounded himself with so many Irish that there were dark rumblings in writings from other staff that he was surrounded by a Hibernian clique. Lincoln paid no attention. There was deep ambivalence in the relationship at the beginning. Lincoln was a Republican, a party that had a deep anti-Irish Catholic core because of the Know-Nothing influence. At first, this did not endear many Irish to him.

  The Irish were, for obvious reasons, fighting hard against the nativists, who were intent on stopping the Irish from voting by using physical violence against them. In August 1855 during the “Bloody Monday” Louisville riots, up to 100 Irish were killed including some who were burned alive.

  But Lincoln made it clear he had no truck with the Know–Nothings, and great leaders like Archbishop Hughes, General Thomas Francis Meagher, and General Michael Corcoran stood up and provided the needed leadership in their community by supporting him. Hughes ran up the Stars and Stripes over old St. Patrick’s Cathedral while Meagher and Corcoran recruited armies.

  Ending slavery was never their most important task, as they saw it. It was safeguarding their own beleaguered community first, though Meagher and Corcoran spoke strongly against slavery. Meagher even called for all blacks to be allowed vote, heresy even amon
g some Lincoln backers.

  The Irish-black relationship included large numbers of intermarriages, and was generally far more complicated than has often been portrayed. Democrats played on fears of Irish-black miscegenation, which they lied was approved by Lincoln, to drive the Irish away from the president in the 1864 election.

  There were also deep tensions with Lincoln’s generals, as many believed the Irish brigades were being used as cannon fodder, given their fatality rates.

  Yet in the end, he plainly liked the Irish. And the Irish loved America, and resented deeply the attempt of the South to secede from it.

  Unlike so many others, such as his wife and his law partner, Lincoln never spoke ill of them even in private correspondence. He had remarkably advanced views on emigration and its benefits that would shame the Know-Nothings of today.

  Why is Lincoln such a fascinating topic? Perhaps because unlike Washington, to who he is most often compared, he was a man in full. Washington still feels as remote as the alabaster statue he is so often portrayed as.

  Lincoln seems eternally modern; his depressions, his decidedly stormy marriage, his self-doubt, his failures, and his tragic death, coming soon after his greatest success.

  But above all, there is that extraordinary vision and empathy, the ability to see what his own generals and cabinet urging compromise could not see—that the very future of democracy was on the line, that there could be no compromise on slavery. He knew that groups like the Irish were not to be despised, but brought on board in the great struggle.

  He was the master mariner in waters that had never been navigated by any president, but he would need the help of the Irish and others to safely reach the shore.

  Coming from a poor and underprivileged background, he understood the Irish only too well. Like him they were magnificent fighters, never better than at Gettysburg, where they played a major role in the outcome of one of the most significant battles ever.

  Their story should be America’s story, but their voices only linger faintly. Their role is ignored by many contemporary historians, including Ken Burns with his landmark PBS series The Civil War. Eminent historian Gabor S. Boritt of Gettysburg College asked a key question about the Burns series: where are the voices of the immigrant soldiers (Irish, German, etc.) who made up 25 percent of the Union Army? Where indeed.

  But they were heard by Lincoln. He gave them credit and acknowledgment for what they accomplished but also held them up to criticism and punishment when they fell short, as in the abysmal draft riots, the worst moment in Irish-American history.

  We should never forget that the Irish helped Lincoln save democracy and end slavery. Hopefully, this book will play a part in ensuring that one of the most important stories in the history of the Irish is not forgotten.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Scoop of the Century

  In the misty early morning of Wednesday, April 26, 1865, three men in a small rowing boat set out from Crookhaven, a tiny fishing village in County Cork, Ireland, to intercept the mail steamer Marseilles.

  The Marseilles had rendezvoused off the Cork coast and picked up canisters of US mail from the Teutonia, a Hamburg-bound ship via Southampton that had left New York twelve days earlier. The Teutonia had loomed into view off the Irish coast at 8:00 a.m. It was carrying the latest news from America.

  The three men, the lookout who had first sighted the ship from a rocky outcrop called Brow Head, and the men on the mail ship itself, were all paid employees of Paul Julius Reuter, a dynamic newspaperman and German immigrant who was determined to have the news first, whatever it took. His name would become a household one soon enough because of the events of that day.

  Like all successful men and women of business, Reuter saw an opportunity and took it. In his case, it was building a private telegraph line from Cork City to Crookhaven, the first point of land close enough for a ship from America to be intercepted. The other news services would wait until the ship pulled into Cobh, then called Queenstown, some twenty-five miles further up the coast. Time was money, and Reuter was in a hurry.

  At the time, it took about twelve days by steamship to cross the Atlantic. Telegraph lines west from London stopped at County Cork. In America, no working lines yet crossed the Atlantic though there had been many attempts.

  Thus, in April 1865 any news from the United States would first come from the mail boat picking up from the transatlantic steamer in the waters off County Cork, the closest landfall, and would then be quickly routed to London and Europe through the Cork City cable office.

  If Abraham Lincoln had died just one year later the news would have reached Europe almost immediately, as the first working transatlantic telegraph cable would make land at Valentia Island off Kerry. In 1866. It could handle eight words per minute.

  The Marseilles this day would carry the biggest story of the century—the assassination of American president Abraham Lincoln. Though he had been shot on April 14 and America was ablaze with the news and the successful hunt for the assassin, Europe remained blissfully unaware until twelve days later.

  The main news in the London Evening Standard was the celebration and events around the tercentenary of the birth of William Shakespeare and the death of the elder brother of the Czar of Russia.

  That was about to change.

  The key man was James “Tugboat” McLean, Reuter’s man in New York.

  McLean was Reuter’s go-getting correspondent, in those days called an agent. He was later called “Tugboat” because his news of Lincoln’s death almost came too late to put aboard the Teutonia. He pursued the ship on a tugboat and threw the watertight canisters containing his historic report aboard.

  Some claim it was a different man than McLean, a fellow German James Hecksher, a friend and New York employee of Reuter’s, who pursued the tugboat and threw the canisters on board.

  Onward the ship sailed across the wide ocean, bearing its message of profound importance and impact, before transferring the news canisters to the Marseilles. When that ship came in sight of Irish shores, the purser lowered the canisters and dropped them in the water as the ship drew close to the three men who had rowed out. They snagged them with nets on long poles like huge fishing nets.

  They rowed back to Crookhaven, where the telegraph operator broke open the canisters and read their sensational import. Soon, the telegraph lines between remote Cork and the great cities of Europe began a chatter that soon built to a frenzy. By the noon bulletin, hours before his rivals, Reuter broke the news that shocked the world. It was so shocking that many thought it a hoax, and Reuter’s reputation was on the line. A few hours later, it was confirmed.

  The Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln was dead.

  Reuter’s news hit Britain and Ireland like a thunderbolt.

  “The blow is sudden, horrible, irretrievable,” wrote the London Evening Standard. “Never, since the death of Henry IV [of France] by the hand of Ravaillac—never, perhaps, since the assassination of Caesar—has a murder been committed more momentous in its bearing upon the times.”

  England wept, Ireland too. Lincoln had been a hero to so many. Grown men cried openly. American consulates were besieged. Church groups, anti-slavery societies, labor groups, chambers of commerce were devastated. Historian Richard Carwardine described that there were some Confederate supporters gloating on the floor of the Liverpool Stock Exchange. One trader cheered, but was thrown out by another who said, “You incarnate fiend, you have the heart of an assassin yourself!”

  A “cult of Lincoln,” in the words of George Bernard Shaw, sprung up in Britain after his death and arguably has continued ever since. In 1920, a statue of Lincoln sculpted by Irish-born sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens was unveiled in Parliament Square, entitled “Lincoln the Man.” Prime Minister David Lloyd was present. Civil War veterans attended.

  The cult spread to Russia, where forty-five years later Leo Tolstoy stated, “The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar, or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln.”
He predicted that “his example is universal and will last thousands of years.”

  Reuter was forever famous for bearing the news. Hollywood even came out with the film A Dispatch from Reuter’s in 1940, starring Edward G. Robinson as Reuter, about the events around getting the Lincoln story first.

  The news of Abe Lincoln’s death first came ashore in Ireland. It would be the last connection between a legendary president and a country whose people had played a huge role in his life. Lincoln’s relationship with the Irish was an extraordinary story, too.

  When the Kentucky backwoods rail splitter set out on his extraordinary political journey, he encountered the Irish at every step. His rise coincided with the greatest ever inward migration of a people, the million Irish fleeing the Famine. In a country of just twenty-three million, the arrival of the Irish had an immense impact.

  He knew them, fought them, embraced them, cursed them, thanked them profusely, and kissed their flag. He gathered a Hibernian cabal around him in the White House and was criticized for so doing. It is highly unlikely he could have won the most important war ever fought for the future of democracy without them. They were 150,000 strong in his army, which peaked at 600,000 men in late 1863. Irishmen had never fought in such numbers for their own country. The fuse was lit by the Civil War and in the tide of battle they were led by their heroes like Thomas Francis Meagher and Michael Corcoran.

  Lincoln appeared to regard the Irish with a benign demeanor most of the time. Even in his most private writings, he exhibited none of the hatred towards them that many of his contemporaries, including his wife and law partner, did. He told Irish jokes, very mild in nature. The old Irish doorman Edward McManus at the White House was said to be the only person who could make him laugh with his funny Irish stories.

  His children were cared for by them. He wined and dined their heroes, such as Thomas Francis Meagher and Michael Corcoran, and showed up at a Fighting 69th camp and kissed the Irish flag. Francis Burke, the man who drove him to Ford’s Theatre that dreadful night, was Irish, as was his valet Charlie Forbes, the last man to speak to the assassin Booth before he killed the president.