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Title: The Fall of the Great Republic (1886-88)
Author: Coverdale, Henry Standish
Language: English
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THE FALL
OF THE
GREAT REPUBLIC.
BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1886.
_Copyright_, 1885,
BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
THE FALL
OF THE
GREAT REPUBLIC.
(1886–88.)
BY
SIR HENRY STANDISH COVERDALE
(_Intendant for the Board of European Administration
in the Province of New York._)
“O Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are committed
in thy name!”
_By Permission of the Bureau of Press Censorship._
NEW YORK:
1895.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY.--THE “HARD TIMES”
OF 1882–1887 7
II. THE MORAL INTERREGNUM 15
III. THE SOCIALISTIC POISON 27
IV. THE RULE OF IRELAND IN AMERICA 32
V. THE FIRST ERUPTION 51
VI. ANXIOUS FOREBODINGS 77
VII. THE REVOLUTIONISTS’ MASTER-STROKE 86
VIII. THE REIGN OF ANARCHY 96
IX. ATTEMPTS TO SAVE THE GOVERNMENT 103
X. THE LAST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
STATES 115
XI. A PRECIOUS TRIUMVIRATE 124
XII. WAR WITH ENGLAND 128
XIII. CAPTURE OF BOSTON 141
XIV. THE EUROPEAN COALITION 159
XV. THE ALLIES ATTACK NEW YORK 171
XVI. THE FINAL STRUGGLE 192
XVII. FOREIGN OCCUPATION 198
APPENDIX.
I. THE SOCIALISTIC SPIRIT IN 1885 207
II. A REVOLUTION NEAR AT HAND.--“IT
MUST COME” 209
III. A FEMALE SOCIALIST’S ADVICE 211
IV. ATHEISM, COMMUNISM, AND ANARCHY 212
V. THE FORCES ARRAYED AGAINST CIVILIZATION 213
VI. THE PROSPECTS OF AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN
DYNAMITERS AND COMMUNISTS 214
VII. TWO CONTEMPORARY CRITICISMS 215
VIII. THE COURTS.--ONE JOURNALISTIC WARNING
OUT OF MANY 217
IX. THE UNPROTECTED ATLANTIC COAST 218
X. A SINGLE ILLUSTRATION OF THE IRISH-AMERICAN
SPIRIT 219
XI. THE ARMY OF THE DISCONTENTED 222
XII. DEFENDING DYNAMITE ASSASSINATION 223
THE FALL OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC.
I.
INTRODUCTORY.--THE “HARD TIMES” OF
1882–1887.
It is my purpose to relate the fall of the Great Republic. I shall be
brief, yet shall omit no detail necessary to a perfect comprehension of
the causes which underlay the catastrophe and the events through which
it came to pass. I shall set forth the curious sequence of ignorance,
wickedness, and folly which led to the terrible result. I shall show
how the boasted wisdom of the fathers became the inherited curse of
their descendants. I shall describe the political and social revolution
by which in a few months a nation of grand promise, and with a history
unequalled for its century of growth and achievement, was transformed
into the most pitiful wreck of all time. I shall narrate the story
whose outcome has proved to the world the utter futility of the
experiment of popular self-government, until men shall have attained a
richer knowledge and a sweeter morality than thus far exist.
The citizens of the United States felt at the close of the Civil
War of 1861–1865 that they had demonstrated their ability to govern
themselves wisely and successfully. They considered the experimental
stage of their history passed, the volume completed and closed, the
verdict rendered. They imagined the possibility of no greater strain
on their institutions than had already been triumphantly endured. In
truth, there was the appearance of reason in their conviction. No
nation had ever more successfully passed the ordeal of civil strife.
The magnanimity shown to the conquered rebels after the war, even
after the assassination of Lincoln; the temperate endurance with which
the country suffered the incubus of Johnson’s maudlin administration;
the rapidity and ease with which the enormous war-debt was paid off;
the general good-nature which averted bloodshed during the disputed
election of 1876; the smoothness with which the administrative
machinery bore the shock of Garfield’s murder,--all these events,
coming closely after the vindication of the national idea and of
personal liberty in the suppression of the Southern rebellion,
convinced the people of the United States, and those of other lands
as well, that “the experiment of popular self-government” had really
achieved success.
And yet there had been warnings enough of the volcano smouldering
underfoot, if the eyes and ears of public men had been open to see and
hear. Beginning at the time of President Garfield’s assassination, the
one cry which went up from the common people, the working people of
the land, was for years that of “Hard Times.” Business received a blow
in that year from which it did not recover. Trade was slow and meagre;
purchases of all sorts were made “from hand to mouth;” workshops and
factories lay idle because there was insufficient demand for their
products; men who felt keenly the disgrace of failure to support their
families were compelled to beg for public aid to keep their humble
homes and to supply even the most sordid demands of life. For years
the country’s economic policy had been such as to poison the air with
false doctrine and enervate the energies of commerce by vacillating
action. It would be a bootless task to discuss now the relative merits
of “Free-trade” and “Protection” to the United States. Perhaps either
policy, adhered to with reasonable fidelity and administered, as to
its details, with such common-sense as men are accustomed to use in the
conduct of their private affairs, would have obviated the loss of work
and the consequent poverty and want which filled the land, from 1882 to
1887, with a constantly deepening tide of misery. But the whole subject
was made the shuttlecock of petty politics and pitiful politicians,
until the nation ceased to have a policy which could be recognized or
was of any avail as a stay before the sweep of commercial failure and
pecuniary distress.
It is asserted that no less than two and a half million operatives
and working-men were idle in the fall of 1887, when the first serious
outbreaks occurred. By far the larger number of these had been unable
to earn enough, during the preceding two years, to pay the rents
demanded for their cottages and hovels, and were constantly in danger
of ejection, without the hope of finding another home. The land was
filled with idle workmen, many of them foreigners unaccustomed to free
institutions, and bitter in their denunciations of all government,
which was to them the synonym of tyranny. Few, of either foreign or
native birth, were possessed of sufficient discrimination to discover
the underlying causes of their misfortunes, or of wisdom enough to set
about remedying them.
Despite the world-wide knowledge of this lack of remunerative
employment in the United States, the ranks of the unemployed and
dissatisfied there were constantly recruited by immigrants from the
most dangerous classes of Europe. The vigorous action which had been
taken in 1886 and 1887 by the Governments of Germany, Russia, and
Austria, looking to the extirpation in their dominions of socialism,
nihilism, and their kindred poisons, and the refusal of Switzerland,
England, and France to afford asylum to the expelled fanatics, had
forced them to take refuge in America. One or two of the wisest and
bravest among the statesmen of the land raised their voices against
receiving and harboring these men. But the public had few statesmen in
its service. Mere politicians and demagogues were in greater popular
favor than statesmen who despised the cheap tricks and unworthy
flattery which won the common ear. Public men generally had come
to think more of majorities than of principles; to labor for their
own election to office rather than for the good of the country. The
newspapers were commonly partisan and devoted to purely partisan
ends,--the chief of which was, naturally, partisan success. None dared
to do or say anything which might offend and alienate voters; and so
every steamship from Europe continued to bring to the Atlantic ports
of the country full steerage-loads of men who were not thought fit
to live under the Governments of Europe, but who, almost on their
landing, became citizens and voters in the Republic. Added to these
were the tens of thousands of Irishmen whom the stringent measures of
Parliament, adopted after the dynamite explosions of 1884 and 1885,
had driven from their native island. Over half a million able-bodied
men, without mention of women or children, expelled outlaws of Europe,
landed at New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the two years of
1885 and 1886. They swelled the ranks of workmen without work, and
helped reduce by competition and division the already scanty wages
of labor. Every one of them was a poisonous ferment dropped into the
already over-stimulated mass of popular discontent and agitation. They
invariably united with the existing centres of socialism and Fenianism,
making these organizations, even without other converts, tenfold more
dangerous than they had ever been before.
II.
THE MORAL INTERREGNUM.
It was in many respects a strange era; it justified the phrase which
an eminent writer had suggested for it,--of the “moral interregnum.”
Immersed in the cares of private business, and chiefly actuated by
an insatiable craving for money or the luxury and social distinction
which money brought, the majority of those men who should have been
the stay and support of good government paid little heed to public
affairs, but rather left them to the control of adventurers, of
professional politicians who followed politics as gamblers follow
cards,--for the sake of what they could steal from more honest men,--of
the least intelligent and least moral members of the state. Their
common pleas were, either that they were invariably out-manœuvred
in the political battle by these veteran strategists, and that they
could do no real good at the primaries and the polls, or that the
solid good sense and honesty of the country could be relied upon to
come out and assume control whenever things passed beyond endurance,
and that, meantime, all effort was simply thrown away. It is a natural
assumption, now that the end has been seen of all men, that those who
used these arguments must have been either fools or selfish knaves. Yet
they comprised within their number a large proportion of the successful
business and professional men of the country, who could not have thus
succeeded had they been devoid of all ability, and who certainly
regarded themselves as honest men. The result of their neglect of their
country in behalf of their pockets was that while domestic morality,
both ideal and real, remained in many parts of the land upon a lofty
plane, public morality practically ceased to exist.
Men were elected to office, not because they were fitted for the
positions to which they aspired, nor because any one believed them
fitted, but because they were “available;” because they happened to
have few active enemies; because they were comparatively unknown, and
nothing could be said against them; because they were rich enough to
contribute liberally to corruption funds for the purchase of venal
voters; because, in short, they were especially unfit for either honor,
trust, or responsibility. The tone of public life became deplorably
low. Officials of every station accustomed themselves to ask, when any
course of action offered itself, not “Is it right? Is it wise?” but
“How will it affect my continuance in office? Will it hurt the party’s
prospects?”
Saddest of all and most disheartening was the almost universal extent
to which this feeling spread among the people. They came to consider
this dishonorable and cowardly attitude on the part of Government
officers as natural and quite to be expected. The few who remonstrated
or pleaded for a more honest official spirit were regarded with
good-natured contempt as men meaning well and having lofty ideals, but
too visionary for “practical politics;” as “doctrinaires,” “theorists,”
etc. There has been corruption in other lands and under other forms of
government. But the demoralizing fact in the United States was, not
so much that official corruption and cowardice was the rule, as that
the people who had the power to rebuke and reform such a condition of
things condoned it, took it for granted, continued the corrupt and
cowardly time-servers in office and responsibility, or changed them for
other equally unfit but shrewder rogues.
It was not strange, in this condition of public sentiment, that other
trusts than those of Government were abused. The last decade of the
Republic was signalized by an unprecedented number of defalcations,
embezzlements, and similar crimes against private trust. In the
treatment of these crimes, even more clearly than in regard of
public dereliction, the utter demoralization of public opinion was
demonstrated. It is true that the public prints teemed after each
new rascality with virtuous demands for the infliction of condign
punishment. It is true that prosecuting officers commonly made
complaints and issued warrants with exemplary promptness, taking
good care that the newspapers were duly informed of their energetic
action. It is true that occasional embezzlers were actually punished
by sentences of imprisonment fixed at the minimum extreme of lax and
unjustly lenient laws. But these were exceptional cases. Many of the
embezzlers were men of social standing or of political importance; they
had numerous friends; and, no matter though their guilt was clear as
the day, it was assumed by the nonchalant public,--taken for granted,
even by those who had suffered most,--that these friends would use
all their influence to obstruct or prevent merited punishment. In a
majority of cases they were too successful. Officials who should have
stood faithful sentinels over the public weal to compel the enforcement
of justice, generally bowed before the influence which might be exerted
to oust them from their offices if they should prove inconveniently
virtuous. Sometimes the embezzler was allowed to bribe his custodian
and escape. Sometimes he was admitted to bail in such a trifling
sum that a percentage of his stealings paid the cost of a default.
Sometimes he was allowed to bargain with those whom he had robbed.
It was not considered disgraceful or wrong, if a bank cashier had
stolen enough to ruin his bank, for the directors to accept his offer
to repay half the amount stolen, in consideration of their agreement
not to prosecute him. Public sentiment admitted that this compounding
felony was objectionable, but refused to condemn the directors who
committed the crime for trying to save some of their property from
complete wreck. It was taken for granted that men cared more for their
wealth than for their honor or the public weal. Even such embezzlers as
were actually imprisoned seldom failed to secure from pliant pardoning
boards such commutations as rendered their punishment farcical. It came
to be a common saying that it was safer to rob a bank of a million
dollars than to steal five dollars from a merchant’s till to buy food
for a starving wife or child.
The courts, which should have remained the trust and reliance of the
people, became as untrustworthy as public sentiment itself. Lawyers
adopted the rule that it was their part to win causes for their
clients, right or wrong. “Get money! honestly if you can; but get
money,” was the motto of the business element. “Win your case! by fair
means, if possible; but win your case,” was the motto of the legal
guild. The advocate who won his client’s case by taking advantage of
technicalities or by securing an incapable or prejudiced jury, or
by the introduction of false witnesses whose perjuries could not be
exposed at the moment, was sure to attain wealth and a high position at
the bar. Actual jury-bribing was suspected in many cases; but those who
should have been the first to ferret out such offences cared not enough
about the purity of the courts to trouble their leisure with the matter.
The judges aided in many States to make the courts over which they
presided inefficient and to bring them into public contempt by their
blind adherence to outworn precedent and their indiscriminating
affection for technical pleadings. Though generally men of the highest
personal probity, they might be relied upon in any trial to ignore the
spirit of the law and the interests of society if a clever attorney
could point out in the letter of the law or in some century-old
precedent anything to justify them in so doing. A misplaced comma was
sufficient to overthrow the intent of an entire statute.
This characteristic of the courts found ample room and verge enough for
the most fantastic tricks in a society which was governed by annual
legislatures, pouring forth with each succeeding session a very flood
and freshet of ill-considered and crudely expressed legislation. So
complicated and unintelligible at last became the law that those judges
and counsellors who really loved Justice and persistently sought after
her, were seldom able to discover her form or features through the
mist and fog of statutes and codes and revisions and amendments and
precedents which filled the atmosphere in every court devoted to law
and, ostensibly, to justice. The wisest men and those who devoted
their life-long study to the subject were not always able to tell what
the law really meant, or whether it meant anything, under the varying
interpretations put upon it by different expounders.
Thus it came to pass that any suitor or defendant, provided he was rich
enough to secure adroit and learned counsel, was generally able so to
delay and hamper the naturally loitering steps of the courts as, by
the very law of chance, to bring about opportunities for escape which
time could not help affording him. The rich man, whether in a civil or
a criminal trial, was much more likely to win his case, whatever its
merits, than the man who was unable to employ counsel familiar with the
quips and crookednesses of the law. In truth, the prisoner accused of
crime who was unable to pay large counsel fees or to bring “influence”
to bear in some way or other upon the prosecuting officials, was
apt to be treated with comparative severity. Within the same year a
bank cashier of New York stole $800,000 from his bank, but escaped
all punishment by negotiating with the directors for the return of
$400,000; while a young street thief of the same city was sent to the
penitentiary for twelve years for stealing a penknife worth twenty-five
cents! The needy mechanic who purloined a few dollars worth of old junk
and sold it to buy either bread for his family or liquor for himself
was fairly sure to be punished with as long a term of imprisonment as
the defaulter who made away with millions. He was, moreover, certain
of punishment, if detected; while the greater thief had at least three
chances in four of escaping untouched.
In all directions public sentiment had become corrupted; the popular
aspiration had declined to low and sordid levels: yet men looked calmly
on the sham and humbug and selfishness and dishonesty and injustice
which made up the social order of the time, and felt neither fear nor
disgust. Even those whose moral senses were acute enough to perceive
the rottenness around them stopped their moral olfactories and blinded
their moral vision with the unworthy reflection that the existing
fabric would last out their time; and then the deluge might sweep
whither it would.
III.
THE SOCIALISTIC POISON.
Meanwhile, below the thin and treacherous surface, the volcanic fires
of a socialistic agitation were blazing up with daily increasing
fierceness. The failure of work to laboring men; the widespread and
intense suffering consequent thereupon; the conviction that this was
not due to any lack of zeal or industry on their part, but to the
unequal workings of an artificial and false social order; the growing
belief that poverty had become a bar to civil rights, even in the
courts, and that wealth had become a sufficient protector of injustice
and crime,--all these things combined to add an irresistible weight in
the minds of thousands of the less discriminating among the laboring
class, especially those of foreign birth, to the arguments and appeals
of the socialistic leaders in behalf of a complete overturn,--a
“revolution.”
Some of these socialistic apostles were simply theorists who could
not comprehend why their lofty ideals were in any way impracticable.
Others were fanatics,--honest, zealous, earnest, and illogical as
fanatics have always been. Others were really maniacs, whom a long
life spent under the oppression and tyranny of foreign monarchies had
driven into a fierce and virulent hatred of all government and all
order. Others were men who would have been unwilling to earn their
daily bread by honest industry, had the means been placed at their
hands, but who foresaw in great popular disturbances possibilities
for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. All worked harmoniously,
however, in the common direction of social anarchy. They had utterly
unlike conceptions of the new order which ought to be established on
the ruins of the old, but they were united in the one conviction that
the old must be wholly demolished before the task of reconstruction
could be properly begun. And so idealists of noble but impracticable
aspirations, and brawling fanatics, and beery mountebanks, and maniacs
ambitious for unbridled and orderless anarchy, though perhaps not on
speaking terms with each other personally, worked together for one
common end, and that end revolution and destruction.
The vigorous measures which had been taken by all the nations of
Europe between 1885 and 1887 to clear their own borders of these
revolutionists had been effectual in driving hundreds of thousands
of them to America. They brought with them their theories, their
fanaticism, their fierce hatred of all orderly society. Belonging for
the most part themselves to the working-class, they mingled freely with
the discontented and suffering workmen whom they found already too
numerous in the land for the work which was offered either to labor or
to skill. Everywhere they spread the infection of their destructive
theories. Socialistic organizations sprang up, under one name or
another, in almost every city and town and village. Beginning with the
Hocking Valley riots in 1884–1885, and, like those disturbances, in
constantly closer alliance with the trades-unions, these socialistic
societies caused numerous local outbreaks in the districts where
workmen were most numerous and work hardest to obtain. Pittsburg,
Wheeling, and Fall River suffered especial loss in these riots.
So early as the winter of 1884–1885 it was estimated that in New York
city alone eighty-five thousand would-be industrious workmen lay idle,
in addition to other thousands never estimated, because outside the
pale of any possible census-taking, who would not have worked had the
opportunity been offered them. A little more than a year later it was
freely asserted among the socialists of the country that twice this
number were enrolled in their organizations within a radius of ten
miles from the New York city hall. In the outbreaks which occurred at
other places the officers to whom was committed the task of restoring
order generally found themselves opposed most vindictively by men who,
a few years before, would have been regarded as the “bone and sinew”
of the land. It was noted, too, that these men were always the last to
yield to force; that they were always the most sullen and revengeful
when finally compelled to do so; and that, even when convicted and
undergoing imprisonment, they never showed repentance or sorrow except
for failure, constantly boasted of their determination to “try it
over again,” and steadily adhered to the belief they would ultimately
triumph.
IV.
THE RULE OF IRELAND IN AMERICA.
But neither in the importation of exotic socialistic germs nor in the
fungus-like growth of indigenous disaffection and corruption lay the
only dangers of the Republic. The heterogeneous elements which made up
the population of the United States had suffered a great and wholly
unfortunate race-change since the foundation of the Government. At the
close of the Revolution which separated the colonies from England the
country was populated with a sparse but homogeneous people, possessing
in an eminent degree the sterling virtues and the robust common-sense
which characterize the Anglo-Saxon race. The freedom which these men
won and had no capacity for abusing they felt would be safe forever in
the hands of descendants sprung from their loins. The government they
formed was exactly fitted for themselves and for a succeeding nation
possessing their sense of order and their intelligence. But they saw a
vast unexplored continent opening its wealth before them. Their numbers
were but few for its conquest and reclamation. They felt the need of
more men. Relying upon the freedom of the institutions they bequeathed
and upon the virtue and vigor with which they endowed their heirs,
they invited immigration from Europe. They took it for granted that
the immigrants would be few in comparison with the native population,
and that they would be absorbed and assimilated by the majority as
snow-flakes falling in the ocean are absorbed by the great waters and
made a part of them.
At first the stream of immigration which flowed westward was no larger
than they had anticipated, and gave cause for little fear, either by
reason of its size or of the classes and races which composed it. But
before the first fifty years of the Republic had passed, it became
clear that the asylum which it offered was being taken advantage of
chiefly by the Irish, and by the very worst portion of the Irish at
that. They found their own little island too narrow for them, and
flocked to the United States by the hundred thousand. Coming, the most
of them, from the lowest ranks of a degraded and ignorant peasantry,
they found themselves, in the United States as at home, in a position
of inferiority in everything save citizenship. Clannish by race and
religious prejudice, they brought with them all their insular and
ethnic narrowness and exclusiveness, and remained up to the end of the
chapter a class by themselves. Other nationalities sent immigrants who
threw off their old allegiances upon touching American soil, became
in fact as well as in name Americans, intermarried with Americans,
and brought up their children to become wholly American in deed and
aspiration. But the Irish seldom married outside their own race; they
brought up their children to be first Catholic and then Irish as
themselves; they remained, and their descendants after them to the
third and fourth generation, as much Irishmen as their cousins who
continued to inhabit Leinster and Munster.
But they seized with greater eagerness than was exhibited by any other
immigrants every political privilege which was within their reach. In
politics as in all other interests, their clannishness kept them mainly
confined to one party; but even in that they stood as far as possible
aloof from the real and patriotic Americans serving in the same
organization. Coarse of feature and coarser of mind; servile in their
devotion to religious forms, which were never any better than forms
to them; superstitious to the last degree; blunted in moral sense so
as to be amenable to fear alone as a restraining sentiment; utterly
illogical and the slaves of ignorant prejudice,--it would be difficult
to conceive of immigrants from any modern race less fitted than they
for self-government or for exercising a share in the government of
others. There were occasional brilliant and noble exceptions; but of
the majority this picture is not over-colored. Wherever they touched
the political garment they defiled it. In the cities, where their
increase by steady immigration and by their own amazing procreative
fertility gave them the majority, their power was invariably signalized
by a corruption and local tyranny greater than that against which Adams
and Jefferson and Washington revolted. As their numbers increased and
they became more assured of their political power, their arrogance and
reckless abuse of public trust became daily more and more exasperating.
Through all the political changes to which other voters were subject,
they remained in practical effect an organization by themselves. As has
been said, they grasped with insatiate greed every political right and
privilege which the laws afforded them, but refused to become any the
less Irishmen. They stubbornly persisted in putting loyalty to the land
they had abandoned above loyalty to the land they had adopted and which
had opened its hospitality to them. Instead of becoming in reality
as well as name American citizens, they remained Irish citizens, an
_imperium in imperio_, and spoke of their life in the United States,
even while they were exercising the franchise or sharing in the
emoluments of office there, as an “exile.” They boldly proclaimed
themselves “patriots,” because, having fled to the United States and
accepted its protection and its asylum, they still professed greater
devotion and a heartier loyalty to the fatherland they had forsworn
than to the country to which they had solemnly pledged, by becoming
citizens of it, their voluntary and complete allegiance.
In immense numbers these “exiles” united in more or less secret and
criminal associations for the “freeing of Ireland.” At first their
schemes were comparatively peaceful and their meetings open; but as
time passed on, and little visible progress was made in the task of
abrogating English supremacy in Ireland, the plots of the wilder
zealots grew in acceptance, and the machinations of the plotters took
on deadlier aspects. Not only did nine tenths of the later immigrants
hasten into these various societies, but fully as great a proportion
of the American-born sons of Irish refugees went with them. Whatever
may have been their original intentions, such societies as the “Ancient
Order of Hibernians,” the “Clan-na-Gael,” the “Emmet Clubs,” the
“National Leagues,” and the like became in the end a series of widely
ramifying conspiracies. In their meetings the wildest schemes of
vengeance against England were planned, and bloody plots deliberately
woven, not only for the commission of the most fiendish and inhuman
crimes against English men and English women and children, but also
aiming at the embroilment of the United States in actual war with the
other great Anglo-Saxon Power. A large proportion of the most brutal
crimes committed in England and Ireland during the long agitation were
planned in the United States by these organizations. By far the larger
part of the money with which the agitation was fomented and the crimes
paid for came from contributions made in the United States, openly and
without any attempt to conceal the purposes for which they were made.
At the head of one of the worst of these Irish organizations was
an agitator who had been driven out of Ireland on account of his
persistent attempts against the Government, named Patrick O’Halloran,
but more commonly known as “Patsy.” It was by this assumed addition
to his name that he was best known. The gang of which he was the
acknowledged leader conceived the idea of using dynamite, either in its
crude form or made up into “infernal machines,” for the destruction of
property and life in England. It was the natural weapon of cowards,
who fancied they saw in it a means to inflict serious injury on
their enemy without his being able to strike back. It was eagerly
adopted by numerous Irish “patriots,” and a school of murderers and
destroyers arose, calling themselves “dynamiters.” These American
societies collected the necessary funds and sent emissaries to England
to purchase or carry with them dynamite for use in blowing up public
buildings.
During 1884 two explosions, thus planned, took place in London
railway-stations. They were so calculated as to render probable the
greatest loss of life among the travelling public; but by lucky chances
failed to do anything more than cause much destruction of property and
a few slight wounds. In the winter of 1884–1885 explosions of a similar
nature occurred in the Tower and the Parliament buildings. By these
several innocent sight-seers, including a number of little children,
were shockingly mutilated. Shortly afterwards the police discovered and
frustrated a plot to blow up the entire auditorium of the Princess’s
Theatre during an expected visit of the Prince of Wales to that place
of amusement. The details were kept secret, however, in the hope of
finding some clew to the perpetrators of the villany. Beyond the
discovery that an unknown Irishman had brought the explosive with him
from America in a crowded steamship, thus endangering the lives of
several hundred passengers, nothing was definitely found out.
It was inevitable that these events should have the effect of hardening
the English heart towards Ireland and increasing the unwillingness
of the English Government to grant anything like home rule to a
people which showed itself capable of such crimes, and which almost
unanimously applauded them. Nor, considering the Irish character and
the utter inability of the Irish mind to reason where its prejudices
are involved, could it be thought strange that the English severity
which these outrages compelled was accepted by the entire Irish
populace as a sufficient excuse to throw aside every figment of
humanity to which they had thus far laid claim, and to join themselves,
heart and soul, to the most barbarous schemes of the vilest wretches
who professed affection for “Poor Ireland.”
In the early winter of 1886–1887 a state dinner had been prepared at
Windsor Castle. A large number of titled and prominent guests had been
bidden, and it was announced that the Queen would honor the banquet by
her presence. Owing to a detention of a few minutes in the arrival of
the train from London, bringing several members of the Cabinet, the
hour originally set for the dinner was, at the last moment, changed,
and a short postponement of the dinner ordered. In this interval, and
not ten minutes after the time at which, had the original arrangements
been carried out, the guests would have entered the dining-hall,
there occurred under it a terrible explosion, by which it was utterly
wrecked. As it happened, no one was in the room except a servant, who
was engaged in arranging the flowers upon the table. His death was
instantaneous; and it was hours before the mangled remains of his body
were exhumed from the smoking ruins.
The news of this direct attempt on the Queen’s life filled England with
a perfect fury of revenge. Popular sentiment demanded the adoption
of stringent measures for the suppression of “dynamitism” and the
punishment of criminals engaged in it. A flood of bills was let loose
upon Parliament, the enactment of the mildest of which would have
resulted in the depopulation of Ireland and its transformation into
an English colony. Meetings were held in every part of England and
Scotland to express detestation of this attempt to murder the Queen.
The newspapers were filled with the most sensational appeals and the
most scorching invective aimed at Irishmen.
In the midst of this turmoil the police arrested Timothy Gallivan, an
American, born in Massachusetts and educated in its common schools,
but the son of an Irish immigrant, full of half-crazy ideas about his
“duty” to Ireland, and fevered with anxiety in some way to “revenge”
her upon her “oppressors.” Secreted in one of the hiding-places to
which Gallivan was tracked were found papers constituting an extensive
correspondence. They proved that Gallivan was an American; that he
was a member of an Irish society in New York; that he held office
in that society; that he had been sent to London as its accredited
agent and representative and at its expense; that his instructions
had been to cause the death, by dynamite explosion, of some member
or members of the royal family, “the nearer the top the better;” and
that he had associated with him, either before or after his arrival
in London from New York, some twenty kindred spirits. The names of
his fellow-conspirators were obtained, either from Gallivan’s papers
or from the confessions of those whose identity had been therein
disclosed. When once any Irish conspiracy began to be unravelled,
there never failed to appear at least half as many “informers” as
conspirators, eager to betray their associates for reward or safety.
This was no exception. In less than two weeks from the date of the
explosion in Windsor Castle, every detail of the plot was in the
possession of the public, and twenty of the “dynamiters,” including
their leader and chief, were in custody, with amply sufficient evidence
in the way of documents, confessions, and corroborating circumstance to
send them all to the gallows. By far the most important and significant
feature, however, in the whole murderous affair was the amount of proof
it put into the hands of the police that the crime was exclusively
Irish-American in its inception, its details, its payment, and even the
_personnel_ of the criminals.
Armed with this proof, the British Government peremptorily demanded
of the United States that the Irish societies within its jurisdiction
which were engaged in this crime be put down, and that action be
taken to prevent further attacks on England by their associate
organizations. The Secretary of State unquestionably appreciated
the justice of the British demand. Unfortunately, however, for both
parties, the British note was couched in a dictatorial and offensive
style. Even this a man of the Secretary of State’s common sense
would doubtless have excused as the natural outcome of a justifiable
indignation, had not an incautious employé in his department allowed
a copy of the note to fall into the possession of a New York daily
newspaper. In twenty-four hours it had been read by every dynamiter in
the country capable of spelling out words. Congress and the executive
departments were promptly made to feel that upon the tone of the answer
to England’s demand depended the political support of more than a
million voters, whose withdrawal would insure the crushing defeat of
the party then in power.
It was the same position in which the men who ruled in Congress and in
the administration had been placed many a time before, confronting
the question whether to do that which was clearly right and trust to
a future public sentiment to justify them, or to throw conscience
and judgment overboard, trim sails to the political squall of the
moment, and hope for the chance at some indefinite future of using
the power thus retained to undo the wrong committed in holding it.
Popular sentiment had often enough shown that the man who did right to
his own detriment was regarded as an impractical fellow, a theorist,
a “doctrinaire.” It was the man who succeeded, who attained power
the soonest and retained it the longest, no matter by what tricks or
sacrifices of conscience, who was looked upon as “smart” and admired
for his “ability.” So, when this time again the question came home to
the men in place and station whether they could afford to do right
and lose the support of the only element which gave their party hope
of success in the North and West, or bow to the blast and continue in
possession of the Government for four or eight years more, they yielded
as they had become accustomed to yield in all similar dilemmas.
A curt and sarcastic reply was despatched from Washington to the
English note, and care was taken that it should be published as widely
in the United States as that document had been. It was received with
a roar of Irish triumph. A few journals criticised it; but they soon
found that there was so much resentment at the offensive tone of the
British letter even among men who sympathized least with the Irish
plot that the Secretary’s snub caused fully as much quiet enjoyment
as annoyance. Other correspondence followed between the two foreign
offices in constantly angrier spirit, and the spring of 1887 found both
nations standing on the very verge of war, waiting only for some overt
_casus belli_ to draw the sword against each other.
Such was the domestic condition of the country, such the elements of
convulsion and upheaval fermenting beneath the thin crust of its social
order, such its relations with the greatest naval Power of the world,
in the month of April, 1887. From that time the march of events was
rapid to the final disaster.
V.
THE FIRST ERUPTION.
The 19th of April was a fateful day in the history of the Republic.
On the 19th of April, 1775, was fought the battle of Lexington, from
which the nation dated its birth as an independent Power. On the 19th
of April, 1861, the Massachusetts Volunteers, hurrying to Washington to
protect the national capital from the threatened attacks of Southern
rebels, were fired upon in the streets of Baltimore by a mob of rebel
sympathizers. On the 19th of April, 1887, began in bloody earnest
the revolution which was fated to end in the utter extinction of the
Republic and the erasure of its once proud name from the list of
nations.
The socialist leaders took to heart and profited by the lesson which
the Cincinnati riots of 1884 had taught. Those disturbances began in
the indignation of an outraged public, angered beyond endurance by
the shameful, repeated, and demoralizing defeats to which justice had
been subjected in the local courts of law. But they soon took on a
different cast. What had at first been the protest of good citizenship
was transformed into a saturnalia of crime and ruffianism. Yet the
very fact that good citizens had been concerned in the first day’s
imprudences made the task of putting down the outlaws and criminals
who continued the riots on the second and third days so much the more
difficult. The suggestion contained in this was not to lie fallow
in the secret councils where anarchy was plotted. Long after the
conspirators were ready to strike, they delayed the blow, till an
occasion should arise in which they might seem, for a time at least,
to be the allies of good and patriotic citizens. Had a leader with
a purpose been behind the Cincinnati riots, they saw that the work
of suppressing them, after their initial success, would have taxed
the resources of the country as well as the State. They waited for an
opportunity.
Composed of men whose grievance was against all law and order, and
whose dream was of untrammelled personal liberty and license, the
socialistic organizations had yet been gathered together, at this time,
into a certain union. They aspired after anarchy, but had reason enough
left to see that if they would destroy an organized government, they
must themselves organize. They had a head, a mysterious centre known
among outsiders and to the most of the socialists themselves as “The
Council of Seven,” but whom the few fully initiated knew to be a single
individual.
Even to this day the name of this person is unrevealed. Like “The
Man in the Iron Mask,” his identity promises to become one of the
mysteries of the ages. Those who were permitted to share his counsels
were few in number, and bound to him and to each other by terrible
oaths requiring them to preserve eternal silence. Among themselves his
name was never uttered or written. He was referred to sometimes as
“Number One,” sometimes as “Ben Hassan,” sometimes, with an approach
to familiarity, as “The Old Man.” Whoever he was, it is certain that
he must have been a man of vast executive ability, of iron will, of
amazingly fertile resources, and of a hatred of civilization and
of the amenities of humanity which would have done credit to the
prime minister of hell. He received the advice of his “cabinet” of
confidential associates; he was in constant correspondence with
socialistic societies all over the Union and in Europe: but it is the
testimony of all the correspondence of this period so far unearthed
that his rule was autocratic, and that even those who protested most
fiercely against all distinction of rank and position yielded him for
the time being a slavish obedience, holding in complete abeyance their
dearest theories until such time as their schemes of disorganization
and anarchy should have become successful. His headquarters were never
mentioned, and his orders emanated from widely separated parts of the
Union; but it was commonly believed that his principal abiding place
was in Chicago.
For years Chicago had been noted for the inefficiency and corruption
of its courts, which were so manifest as to call down censure even
from men who saw nothing serious in the decadence of courts elsewhere.
Frequent miscarriages of justice had made the people of the city
angry beyond measure; and the prophecy had been in many mouths that
a repetition there of the Cincinnati riots, starting from a similar
cause, was only a question of time.
On the morning of the 19th of April, 1887, the jury which had been
sitting in the case of Alfred McKenna, a young man charged with the
murder of John P. Quillinan, returned a verdict finding McKenna
guilty of assault and recommending him to mercy. The murder had been
a peculiarly atrocious one. Quillinan and McKenna had been rivals for
some minor local office, and had quarrelled. McKenna had followed
Quillinan to his home and shot him in the presence of his wife and
daughter, seriously wounding the little girl, who endeavored to protect
her father’s life. There was no denial of these facts by the defence.
But McKenna was a man of some social position, of considerable wealth,
of handsome person and winning address. Moreover, he and his friends
wielded a powerful political influence. The case had required three
trials. Twice the jury had disagreed. The third trial lasted nearly
a month, and the jury took five days to agree upon their scandalous
verdict. It was handed to the clerk of the court in writing during a
temporary adjournment, and the jury separated, first allowing it to be
known that they had originally stood seven for acquittal to five for
murder in the first degree, and that the seven had refused to accept
any compromise more severe upon the prisoner than the one finally
adopted.
In less than an hour after the verdict had been announced, its
character was known over the entire city. McKenna’s political friends
rejoiced; but the vast majority of better citizens felt outraged
beyond endurance. Angry knots of men gathered at every street corner.
A fierce wave of indignation swept over the city. Into the midst of
this public excitement came the news that McKenna had paid the fine of
fifty dollars and costs which the court had imposed, and had left the
court-house a free man, while Quillinan’s widow had been removed in a
fainting-fit, her wounded daughter clinging to her dress, to the county
poor-house. This news was like a shaft of lightning falling upon an
oil-tank. In an instant the city blazed up with inextinguishable fury.
A crowd of maddened men, including in their number many of the best and
most respected citizens of Chicago, hurried with frenzied yells to the
court-house. They filled its lobbies and surged into the room in which
the judge who had fined McKenna was presiding over another case. He
saw mischief in the faces of the very first who burst unceremoniously
upon the speech of the drawling advocate before him. He heard something
worse than mere mischief in the roar of passion and vengeance which
swelled in the courtyard and the street. Hastily adjourning the court,
he fled, barely in time to save his own life.
Finding the jurymen who had returned the verdict in McKenna’s case
already separated, the mob divided. A portion hurried in search of
McKenna; others set out for the residences or places of business of
the obnoxious jurymen; others remained to dismantle the court-room
and hustle the officers who were unlucky enough to fall into their
hands. McKenna heard of the mob and fled the city. Four of the seven
jurymen who had voted “not guilty” also received warning, and escaped.
Three were caught by the mob. Two were hanged to lamp-posts without a
minute’s delay or the opportunity being given them to say a word. The
third, who was reported to have said, before going on the jury, that
“hanging was played out in Chicago as well as New York,” was compelled
to watch the execution of the other two, and taunted with his remark.
His terror and abject pleas for mercy finally prevailed with his
captors, who spared his life and set him free, with a few sharp cuts
from a heavy whip which a dealer in saddlery had seized as he ran out
of his store to join the crowd. But a second party coming up, enraged
because so many of the unjust jurors had escaped, seized him and hung
him beside the bodies of the others.
A young man, afterwards found to be the brother of the widow Quillinan,
sprang on a dry-goods box and made an impassioned harangue to the mob,
telling of the misery of the bereaved family, then huddling together at
the poor-house, while McKenna and his family were rolling in luxury.
Instantly the cry arose, “Burn their houses!” With incredible speed the
mob, already beginning to gather reinforcements from the vilest human
scum of the vile city, rushed to the McKenna mansion. Its inmates fled
from the rear as the mob poured in at the front. Petroleum was brought,
and the house fired in twenty places.
The verdict of the jury had been announced at five minutes after ten
o’clock in the morning. Before three o’clock the judge, the defendant,
and nine of the jurors were fleeing from the city; three jurors had
been hanged by the mob; a round dozen of the most palatial residences
along Michigan Avenue, taking fire from the McKenna mansion, had burned
to the ground. The police had made a feeble effort at the beginning of
the riot to restore order; but the force was a partisan one, it was
largely made up of the party to which Quillinan had belonged, and its
sympathies were really with the mob. When the officers in command saw
leading the rioters the very men to whose influence they largely owed
their positions, they made but a show of resistance. The vengeance of
the mob was allowed to burn itself out.
Suddenly, near the close of the afternoon, as if by magic, every dead
wall and hoarding of the city took on a sinister aspect. From top to
bottom, and from end to end, they glowed with huge red posters, bearing
in white letters in the centre these words:--
NOW!
_By Command of the Council of Seven._
It was the preconcerted signal for the socialist uprising, though of
course nothing of the sort was suspected at the time. In the midst of
the rioting of the day the work of a thousand hands, fastening these
posters to the walls, had not been noticed. Nor was the effect of the
proclamation immediately apparent. The mob slowly dissolved. Night
came on. A few detached bands of marauders wandered about the streets.
They were summarily dispersed by the police, who had recovered their
activity and energy as the character of the rioters changed. The city
newspaper offices were filled with busy scribes preparing sensational
accounts of the outbreak for the morning issues. The proprietors
congratulated themselves in advance upon the enormous editions
which would be sold the next day. Long accounts were telegraphed to
newspapers in other parts of the country. In scarcely one of these
was the appearance of the mysterious placards mentioned. The riot
was believed to be over. The very citizens who had taken part in the
scenes of the morning could be relied upon for aid in suppressing any
unpleasant attempts to renew them. And so the night wore on.
The city bells began to strike the hour of midnight. Suddenly into
their measured and musical strokes clashed the discord of a fire-alarm.
Before the trained ears of the professional firemen could count the
number of the box whence it was sent, another followed. A third and
fourth came almost simultaneously. It was impossible to tell how many
different alarms were being sounded, or what was the number of a
single one. The firemen were confused and uncertain. Messengers arrived
at the engine-houses, in hot haste, begging for help in half a hundred
different directions. The night skies were reddening with the light
of conflagrations which seemed to be raging in every quarter of the
city at once. Above all continued the unmeaning clangor of the bells.
The engines were sent to the nearest fires of which the firemen could
obtain information. But they found at every burning building a foe more
terrible than the flames.
Obedient to the orders of their chiefs and pursuant to a carefully
arranged plan, the socialists, the anarchists, the communists, the
nihilists,--all the combined lawless hordes of the great city had
gathered to strike their first real blow at society. They met with open
opposition the firemen’s efforts to extinguish the flames. Hose was
cut as fast as it could be laid. Engines were attacked and rendered
useless. The entire police force was ordered out; but the fires, which
by this time were raging in a hundred different streets, compelled
their division into small parties. The firemen had been fought only
by destroying their apparatus and by driving them from the buildings
they were trying to save. The police, however, found that the mob
was armed for them with deadlier weapons. Revolvers and rifles were
more numerous among the rioters than clubs among the police. Divided
as they were, and without hope of aid from reserves, the police were
speedily overcome, one detachment after another falling back in
defeat. The mayor was besought to order out the militia. But it was
evident at once that he either sympathized with the mob or was afraid
to take any earnest steps which might anger it. He had been elected
as the representative of the worst political element in the city
and nation. He professed to have scruples lest it should be found
beyond his legal powers to summon the militia. Some of the merchants,
disgusted and dismayed by his conduct, sent hasty despatches to the
State capital, telling what was going on and begging for instant help.
From Springfield orders were issued directing the entire militia of the
State to rendezvous at Chicago.
Morning dawned at last. It found every piece of fire-extinguishing
apparatus in Chicago a useless wreck; it found the firemen scattered
and unable to perform their duties; it found over seven hundred
buildings in ashes, and a still greater number on fire and doomed to
certain destruction; it found ninety-one of the police force dead
on the pavements, and twice as many more suffering from disabling
wounds in hospitals hurriedly extemporized in the parks and among the
suburbs; it found the city in the complete possession of a maddened
mob, a mob numbering over eighteen thousand fully armed men; it found
gathering to oppose them a force of ill-armed, half-drilled, utterly
inexperienced militia, numbering about one third as many. No one at
Springfield had a correct appreciation of the magnitude or character
of the _émeute_. Even the officers commanding the militia failed to
comprehend the difficulty of the task before them.
Hastily forming in front of the Chicago and Alton railroad station, two
regiments, numbering a little over a thousand men, undertook to clear
the street. The rioters met them with a determined front. As usual with
citizen soldiery, their muskets were loaded with blank cartridges, and
they hesitated to fire upon fellow-citizens. They believed that their
appearance would be sufficient to cow the rioters into submission.
They marched steadily to within a few yards of the mob. The officer in
command stepped out in front of his troops and besought the crowd to
disperse quietly, and thus prevent bloodshed. His answer was a laugh
of derision, in the midst of which a rifle-shot was heard, and he
fell mortally wounded on the pavement. The troops fired a volley from
their blank cartridges. The mob responded with a rain of bullets from
rifles and revolvers. With a wild yell they charged on the militia.
Not a bayonet was fixed. The troops stood the onset but a moment, then
broke into disorder. In two minutes they were in full flight, each one
seeking a hiding-place to save his own life.
Elated by this success, the rioters--or the revolutionists, as they
henceforth called themselves--formed in a cordon around the remaining
militia. Among the State troops was one regiment gathered chiefly from
Chicago. Seeing familiar faces in their ranks, some of the mob shouted
to know if they would murder their friends. The regiment contained
many who were themselves affected by socialistic doctrines. The men
wavered. A signal for attack was given from the mob; and with a shout
which rang over the roar of the burning city like the scream of ten
thousand demons, it flung itself upon the little body of militiamen.
The Chicago regiment threw down its arms and refused to fight, a
considerable portion of its men going over to the revolutionists. The
others fought desperately, seeing that it was for their lives. Their
struggle was in vain. The enemy was as brave as they, four times more
numerous, and better armed. Many of the troops had been summoned in
such haste that they had not donned their uniforms, but appeared in the
ranks in their ordinary dress. These, by throwing down their guns and
mingling with the mob, escaped. Of those in uniform not a corporal’s
guard survived.
An officer who contrived to escape unhurt sent the news to Springfield.
Even before the arrival of his despatch the Governor had become
alarmed and had telegraphed to Washington, asking aid from the National
Government. As soon as he learned the disaster which had fallen upon
his militia, he sent another appeal for haste. The national authorities
responded with promptness and zeal. Before noon of the 20th, orders
from Washington had been forwarded to all the available troops east of
the Rocky Mountains to proceed to Chicago without delay and by the most
expeditious routes. General Brook was ordered to take command of the
forces which should meet there, and to suppress the riots.
It was not till the 23d that he felt himself strong enough to move on
the city. On that day he had fifteen thousand troops at his command,
and knew that other detachments, to the number of nearly five thousand
more, were nearing his lines. Shortly before noon his advance entered
Chicago.
It would be impossible to exaggerate the gloom of that entry. No city
which had suffered the pillage and sack of a horde of Vandals in the
early ages of the Christian era ever showed a more terrible picture
of ruin and desolation than Chicago presented to the view of the
soldiers as they marched slowly across what had once been its business
centre toward Michigan Avenue, where it was reported the rioters were
preparing to make a stand against them. All but the revolutionists and
the Irish inhabitants of the city had fled from it. There was no sign
of life in any of the stores or shops which had escaped the flames.
Their doors and windows were generally open, but only to disclose the
fact that they had been gutted by the mob. By far the greater portion,
however, had been burned. The fires which had been kindled on the
night of the 19th had raged all the following day and night, but had
been partially extinguished by a heavy rain which fell all the night
of the 21st. The city was still covered by a dense pall of smoke, and
here and there flames showed themselves among the ruins. It was evident
that there would be no lack of work for the troops, after the rioters
were dispersed, in saving what was left of the city. Not a sign of life
was to be seen along the streets, except when a party of pioneers,
hurriedly searching some house in which there was the possibility that
sharpshooters might be hiding to fire on the troops, now and then
stirred up some drunken ruffian from his alcoholic stupor and dragged
him into the light. The business portion of the city and that occupied
by the residences of the wealthier citizens presented the most complete
ruin. As the soldiers debouched on Michigan Avenue they saw that not a
single one of the magnificent palaces which had once lined that street
was left standing.
As had been expected, the revolutionists were found drawn up
here, protected in front by a rude barricade, in which trunks of
trees, paving-stones, pianos, and pieces of elegant furniture were
inextricably confused. They had seized anything which had bulk, without
reference to its character, to build into the barricade. It was open
towards the lake, and was so clumsily and unskilfully constructed as to
afford almost no protection to the six or eight thousand men who were
seen huddled behind it.
General Brook did not disdain to learn a lesson in tactics from the
action of the mob itself during the fight with the militia. He halted
out of range of the barricade till detachments could be sent so as
to surround it on all sides. Gatling and Hotchkiss guns were brought
to bear upon it from three directions. Neither the general nor his
men had been predisposed by the sights they had witnessed on their
march through the city to show consideration to the rioters. It was
nearly six o’clock when everything was ready. The Gatling guns opened
with a fierce fire upon the barricade, which threw the crowd behind
it into utter confusion. When their fire ceased, the troops with a
ringing cheer sprang forward and attacked the flimsy defences. The
contest was soon over. The revolutionists broke into uncontrollable
disorder. Some one among them raised a handkerchief on the end of a
stick, and the troops were ordered to stop firing. About five hundred
of those who seemed most active in the mob’s ranks were arrested; the
remainder of the crowd was allowed to slink away. The riot was ended;
and the soldiers, after first scouring the city to make sure that no
more resistance was likely to be offered them, turned to the task of
extinguishing with such means as were at their hands the smouldering
fires, which still threatened danger.
It was found that about twenty-five hundred buildings had been burned.
As the insurance companies did not insure against destruction by riot,
the loss was complete and irremediable. How much property was stolen
or destroyed in buildings which were not burned was never known; but
there were few stores or houses giving promise of containing anything
valuable which had not been looted. Nor was the loss of life ever
accurately learned. Weeks after the restoration of order, dead bodies
were discovered in cisterns and sewers or floating in the lake. It is
not probable that all were recovered; but over seven thousand four
hundred deaths are known to have occurred.
A few trials followed the arrests which were made by the army between
the 23d and the 30th of April. But the socialistic poison had invaded
the jury-box; and despite the horror which all the better class of
citizens felt at the barbarians who had sacked the city, it was found
next to impossible to secure a jury which would convict upon anything
but the most overwhelming proof of actual complicity in some specified
crime. This was of course difficult to obtain. Two men who had been
recognized by several firemen as the murderers of a policeman who
attempted to drive them from an engine which they were destroying on
the morning of the 20th, were hanged; a few were sentenced to long
terms of imprisonment; a few others were fined: but against the greater
number all proceedings were dropped, and they were set free.
VI.
ANXIOUS FOREBODINGS.
No words can adequately describe the fear which fell upon good men
all over the land when the real character and purpose of the riot
became known. Considerable sympathy had been felt for the first day’s
movement, which was rightly regarded as a protest against the stupid
inefficiency of the courts, rather than an outbreak against the
established order. But when the awful anarchy of the succeeding days
came to be understood, and the true nature of the plot against society
to be appreciated, there was something like a panic among men who had
stakes in the prosperity of the nation, and whose wealth or homes
depended upon the maintenance of order.
It was not a hopeful sign that, in the midst of this horror and dread
which fell upon men of property and standing, the socialists everywhere
openly expressed their sympathy with the “revolution,” and their belief
that the Chicago riot was only the first gun in a battle which was to
rage over the length and breadth of the land. Nor was the attitude
taken by the Irish any the more reassuring. They had not engaged in the
riots at Chicago, neither had they opposed the rioters. So far as could
be learned, not a single member of any of the great Irish societies had
been molested in person or property during the riots. In other parts of
the country, too, the Irish leaders spoke with a new and strange tone.
They expressed a strong condemnation, it is true, of the excesses into
which the rioters had been “driven;” but in no case did they denounce
the rioters themselves, or fail to express their sympathy with what
they were pleased to term “an oppressed and struggling common people.”
Two days after the troops had taken possession of the city, the
leading daily paper managed to collect enough material and men to
issue a small four-page sheet. The leading article in this issue, in
deliberately chosen but unmistakable language, charged that the Irish
organizations of the city had not only sympathized with the rioters,
but had in many instances actually given them material aid, furnishing
them arms, acting as spies for them, and offering some of the leaders
hiding-places when search was made for them after the restoration of
order. No denial was made to this. But the Irish Press responded to the
charge with a counter-accusation. It declared that the article was the
result of partisan spite, inspired by the fact that the Irish usually
acted with the political party to which their editorial assailant was
opposed. With few exceptions, the Press of that party took up the cry,
and charged his paper with having insulted “a vast and respectable body
of citizens, in order to make contemptible political capital.”
The excitement gradually subsided,--as it was the misfortune (or the
wickedness) of the American people that excitement over public wrongs
always did. But good men everywhere continued to look to the future
with a dread which they did not dare to put into words.
A considerable body of soldiery was retained in barracks close without
the city till midsummer. The withdrawal of so many troops from the
frontier encouraged several of the Indian tribes, who had been most
cruelly cheated and robbed by the Government, to take the war-path. The
Gros-Ventres, the Nez-Percés, the Utes, and the Apaches revolted at
almost the same time, and began attacks on settlers and frontier posts.
The troops were ordered once more to the West; and before the middle
of July there was an even smaller proportion of the regular army east
of the great plains than before the Chicago outbreak.
This situation of affairs roused the better citizens, irrespective
of party, to the necessity for some action to protect other cities
from any attempt on the part of their socialists to imitate Chicago.
Congress was still in session. It had been debating a river and
harbor bill for two months, and had taken up, as a relief, the
momentous question whether a half-million-dollar post-office and
sub-treasury should be built at Mandan. There was every prospect that
two months more would be spent in orations and committee hearings
and bargainings over this question. The members, as usual, appeared
to have no conception of the needs of the country, and no regard
for any dangers which might menace it. A few attempts had been made
to secure some action which might avert the war with England, into
which the continued plots and crimes of Irishmen in the United States
were dragging the nation. But both parties were afraid of the Irish
vote,--more afraid of it than of committing a great wrong on a friendly
Government; and these attempts failed to secure any seconding from
either side. After the riot at Chicago, several set speeches had been
delivered,--that is to say, printed in the “Congressional Record,”--and
a committee had been appointed to investigate the matter. But the
committee was unable to decide whether the son of the senator from
Arkansas, who was chairman on the part of the Senate, or the nephew
of the member from Connecticut, who was chairman on the part of the
House, should be their secretary; and so they had not yet undertaken
to hear anything concerning the matter on which they were appointed.
The majority in both Houses reposed in a sort of intellectual and
moral torpor. When any member did partially awake, it was only to
cast his eye far enough into the future to scan the chances of his own
re-election.
At this juncture a convention of representative business men from
all parts of the land was called at New York to consider the state
of the country. The situation was discussed with freedom, and it was
unanimously resolved that the dangers to which society was exposed
demanded such an increase of the army as would allow the constant
retention of a considerable force within calling distance of the larger
cities, in readiness for another possible outbreak. A petition was
drawn up to this effect, and numerously signed in all the cities. A
committee, consisting of a leading and representative man from each one
of fifty-eight cities, was deputed to present the petition to Congress
and urge the passage of the law suggested.
Congress received the petition, and a member from New York introduced
the bill proposed. Never was a stronger proof given of the truth of
the old saying, “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”
Instead of hastening the passage of the bill, which asked an increase
of only twenty-five thousand men for the army,--making its total
strength but fifty thousand,--Congress delayed any consideration of it
for two weeks. When it finally secured a hearing in the “committee of
the whole House,” it was met by the familiar outcry against the danger
to the Republic of a great standing army. For three weeks more the
“Congressional Record” was filled with high-sounding and attenuated
repetitions of that outworn demagogism. One hundred and thirty-two
speeches were delivered, during these three weeks, upon a measure the
importance of which was manifest upon its face, and the necessity for
which it had not taken a convention of business men as many days to
agree upon. Before this eruption of cheap eloquence had ceased flowing,
the time for useful action had passed. The blow had been struck.
VII.
THE REVOLUTIONISTS’ MASTER-STROKE.
By the latter part of July a considerable portion of the population had
returned to Chicago, many of its business houses were open again for
trade, and others were in process of rapid re-erection. The wharves
were crowded with vessels bringing materials and supplies. The streets
rang with the sound of workmen hurrying forward the construction of
the new city. An intense rivalry sprang up between the proprietors of
different stores as to which should be ready first for business. The
workmen were pushed to the utmost; and it was not uncommon to see a
whole street brilliantly illuminated by electric lights from sunset to
sunrise, while work was pushed twenty-four hours in the day and seven
days in the week. This moment was seized by the mysterious “Council of
Seven” for the grand _coup_. The former riot had been only a rehearsal;
the curtain was now rung up on the drama itself.
At noon on the 18th of July a large majority of the workmen employed
upon the new buildings laid down their tools and compelled those who
were not in the plot to do the same. Their plea was that no man had the
right to exact over eight hours work for a day’s wages, while many of
them were compelled to work twelve hours, and that for seven days in
the week. They demanded fifty per cent increase of wages or a reduction
in the hours of work. In their anxiety to complete their tasks, a few
builders yielded. But the particular “strikers” who had thus won their
case refused to begin work again till all the builders and contractors
of the city should have agreed to their demand. This, too, was finally
brought about. By that time the arrogance of the “strikers” had
increased,--rather, their orders from “The Old Man,” as they called
the revolutionist head, had been modified,--and they refused to take
up hammer or trowel till the city council should pass an ordinance
making eight hours a day’s work, with no deductions for holidays or for
absences by reason of sickness, and with double pay for all night and
Sunday work, whether of necessity, mercy, or caprice.
Roused at last to a conviction that they were being played with, and
that the demands of their men were merely pretexts, a secret movement
for the collection of fresh workmen from abroad was begun by certain
contractors. It was manœuvred with so much secrecy and success that
no news of the scheme escaped till the 10th of August, three weeks
after the beginning of the strike. On that day two long trains loaded
with workmen from neighboring cities rolled into Chicago, and the
jubilant contractors who had secured them led them to the unfinished
buildings, which loomed amid skeletons of scaffolding in various parts
of the city, and set them at work.
The news spread like wildfire among the “strikers,” and angry crowds
gathered before every building on which work had been begun by the
strangers. The interlopers were ordered to lay down their tools and
leave the city. They treated these demands with contempt; and the
superintendents, owners, and contractors, armed with revolvers,
succeeded for a time in keeping the crowds at bay while the “strikers”
waited for orders. Late in the afternoon the orders came. Messengers
were seen forcing their way through the sullenly biding crowds, and
issuing directions on either side as they passed. In an instant the
aspect of affairs changed. The men, who had thus far shown no deadlier
weapons than sticks or occasional bricks and paving-stones, suddenly
drew the revolvers with which they were secretly armed, and began a
deadly attack on the workmen who had refused to drop work at their
bidding.
It would be useless to relate in detail the story of what ensued. The
socialists, having formed an alliance with the Irish societies, had
also absorbed the trades-unions,--another of the curses with which
foreign immigration had endowed the country,--and had chosen them as
the means through which to precipitate this second revolt. Once more
the city was delivered up to a lawless and ravening mob, fourfold more
vindictive and ferocious than that of the April _émeute_.
The Government was again appealed to for troops. But the army was among
the mountains and plains of the farthest West, engaged in the most
desperate Indian war which had yet been waged. Congress was besought
to do something. It continued to emit vast quantities of eloquence (?),
unmingled with common sense, over the dangers attending an increase of
the army. The President issued a proclamation and sent a message to
Congress asking for instructions and authority to summon volunteers.
During the wearisome and fruitless debates with which Congress had
occupied the previous month, bands had been formed in several of
the larger cities, under the title of “Protective Associations,” or
“Protectors,” to defend local interests in case outbreaks should occur
before an increase in the army could be secured. In despair of securing
efficient aid from any other source, the Governor of Illinois--for the
Mayor of Chicago had long since shown himself unwilling to take any
action against the revolutionists--sent an appeal to such cities in the
West as had organized these associations, begging for whatever help
they could send him. His appeal met with a ready and generous response.
Detachments started with all speed for Chicago from Cincinnati, St.
Louis, Louisville, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburg,
Rochester, Buffalo, and other cities. They were undisciplined, but
fully armed, and animated as one man with the determination to crush
the revolutionists so utterly that they should cause no further danger
to Chicago within a generation. Among them were many who had seen
service in the Union army during the great rebellion. The detachments
which first arrived found the enemy stronger than they had supposed,
and discovered that their task was likely to be a severe and costly
one. It was determined to summon still more men; and New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston were called upon. From all, the
response was prompt and loyal. Fully fifty thousand men converged upon
the environs of Chicago.
It does not seem to have occurred to any of those who thus gallantly
hastened to the relief of their sister city that in so doing they were
exposing their own homes, defenceless, to the danger of attack from
domestic organizations in sympathy with the Chicago rioters and acting
under the same direction. But this was the very event for which the
master-spirit of the combined revolutionists had waited; the one which
he had foreseen; the one upon which he had based his plans. While the
trains bearing the last of the reinforcements from New York and Boston
to the “Protectors” before Chicago were flying across the Illinois
prairies, he issued his final order, and struck his long-delayed but
crushing blow. Its effects were instantly and simultaneously felt in
every quarter of the land.
As the little army of citizens, aided by a few national troops which
the Government had been able to gather from forts along the Atlantic
coast, were busily preparing for a movement upon the revolutionists,
telegrams began to pour in upon them from New York, Boston, and the
other cities which they had left, announcing the rising of mobs in
each one and the impossibility of resisting them in the absence of so
many of the natural militia at Chicago. The truth dawned, with the
suddenness of lightning and with equal distinctness, upon the entire
country. It was seen that the revolutionists had waited till a large
proportion of those citizens bound together for the defence of law and
the maintenance of order had been massed in another direction. They had
then, in accordance with a thoroughly understood plan, risen in every
city and begun the work of destruction for which their souls had long
thirsted.
From East and West and South flashed over the shuddering wires dire
tidings of riot, rapine, pillage, murder, anarchy. Destructive
and insatiate mobs ruled in what had been the seats of order and
prosperous trade and happy homes. Every city in the Union was turned
into a veritable gateway of Gehenna. The scenes of barbarous vandalism
which had made the name of Chicago a reproach in the ears of the world
were re-enacted in scores of her sister towns. Leaving Chicago to its
fate, the men who had been summoned to its aid hurried frenziedly
homeward in the hope of saving their families or their possessions from
utter annihilation. The nation stood aghast, panic-stricken, and bereft
of its usual energies before this great horror of incredible wickedness
which had burst with volcanic suddenness and havoc upon the land. From
Boston to Galveston, from Savannah to Minneapolis, the heavens were
thick with the smoke of burning cities bearing upwards in its coils the
reek of innocent blood.
VIII.
THE REIGN OF ANARCHY.
At last Congress and the executive departments awoke. The act for an
increase of the army, asked for two months before, was hastily passed.
It was even amended so as to give the President power to call out a
hundred thousand volunteers from the natural militia of the States, if
such a measure should in his judgment become necessary. But the action,
which might possibly have been useful in the early summer, came too
late at the end of August.
The war which had broken forth was such a combat as had never before
been waged. There have been civil wars in other times and other
countries, but they always have been more or less sectional. Whether
eventually successful or not, there always has been a part of the
land involved in which the friends of existing government were in the
majority, and which could be relied upon as a base for operations
against insurgents. But this revolt was at every man’s door. Except in
a few rural and sparsely populated districts, all forms of government
were disrupted or blocked. The law-abiding citizens found themselves
suddenly without organization and at the mercy of predatory bands,
which fell upon them one after another. The anarchists, by a strange
paradox, were the best disciplined and the best organized.
Here and there hasty levies were made among the friends of good order;
but they did not know whom to trust. A man’s nearest neighbor, who
never had been suspected of sympathy with the socialists, was not
unlikely to prove their agent and propagandist in secret, and in
communication with them, revealing the intentions of their opponents.
Volunteers, who under other circumstances and to repel any other form
of attack would have flocked to the Government’s service from the
smaller villages and country towns, dared hardly stir out of their own
fields, from fear of attacks on their homes.
In the midst of this panic, and uncertainty, and lack of organization,
the telegraph lines between the chief centres of communication were
cut. It was made impossible for the authorities to transmit information
or to perfect arrangements. Despatches from the National Government
to the governors of different States or to its own subordinates were
stopped by agents of the revolutionists and reported to their own
chiefs. These leaders in some instances acted upon the intelligence
thus secured in defeating the Government’s plans. In other cases they
sent back misleading answers, purporting to come from the officials
addressed; thus doubly confusing the Government’s operations.
In many cities and towns the very officers whose duty it was to
preserve order and repress riots felt themselves dependent upon the
votes of the mob for their positions, and dared not do any active work
against it. Wherever it was possible to call out the local militia,
the citizen soldiery were found true, except in a few of the larger
cities where the socialistic contagion was rankest. But the panic which
had fallen on other citizens had not failed to affect these young men,
many of whom had entered the militia for amusement rather than any more
serious purpose, and who were nicknamed by their opponents “holiday
soldiers.” Nowhere were they called into service till it was too late
for anything but overwhelming force to prevail,--such overwhelming
force as they could not muster. Nowhere were the civil magistrates
willing to apply heroic treatment till more pacific measures had been
tried. The revolutionists, drunk with fanatic frenzy and elated with
the success of their first days of destruction and pillage, rushed on
the militia, whenever a collision became inevitable, with reckless
bravery and desperation. The result was that a score of regiments in
as many different States were actually cut to pieces by raging mobs,
while pallid-lipped mayors or aldermen were reading the riot act or
expostulating with them in the hope of inducing them to disperse. It
would have been as sensible to harangue a jungle full of hungry tigers,
or to read the riot act against an inundation of the lower Mississippi.
In a few of the smaller places, especially those near which detachments
of the regular army were stationed, a sort of precarious order was
restored. In all the larger cities the revolutionists soon held
complete power. City and State governments were overthrown. The
leaders among the rioters established themselves in the offices of
public administration. “Universal liberty” was proclaimed, and the
abrogation of all law. “Property is robbery” had been the cry of the
socialists from the beginning. The residences of such citizens as had
been known for their wealth were taken possession of as the barracks
of first one and then another band of marauders. Such storehouses and
shops as had escaped the pillage of the first days were thrown open,
and every one bidden to help himself from their contents to that which
he needed. The poorer people were generally unmolested. If they had
nothing worth stealing they were advised to remain in their homes,
and told that the revolution was for them. There should be no more
wealth; consequently, argued the socialists, there could be no more
poverty. All men were declared equal in point of rights, of duties, and
of possessions. Nothing belonged to any one, for everything was the
common property of all. But it was observed that the socialist leaders
did not fail to secure possession of all the silver and gold upon which
they could lay their hands,--“to be used in the public defence, if
needed,” they said.
IX.
ATTEMPTS TO SAVE THE GOVERNMENT.
The alliance between the socialistic societies and the various Irish
organizations had for some time been impossible of concealment. Still
the Irish had taken a less active part in the bloody inauguration of
the revolution than had the others. The Government at Washington found
communication with the various State Governments practically shut off.
It was helpless for offence or defence. With such troops as it had
been able to collect from Fortress Monroe and a few other neighboring
garrisons, it had barely kept down the revolutionists in Washington. A
band of some ten thousand now set out from New York and Philadelphia
to reinforce them and seize the capital. At a Cabinet meeting held to
consider the situation it was decided to call on the Irish members of
Congress to use their influence with Irish organizations throughout the
country, either to detach them altogether from the revolutionists, or
to bring about some understanding by which a peace might be patched up
till the next national election should afford the people an opportunity
to pass upon the whole matter.
These Irish members had distinguished themselves, during the long
debates which had dragged through the early summer and the heated
tirades which had succeeded the first outburst of the revolutionists,
by sitting unmoved in their seats, taking no part in the proceedings
except when some chance allusion by another speaker afforded them the
pretext for uttering a fierce demand that the United States undertake
“the cause of Ireland.” They seemed to have lost all sense of American
citizenship, and to have become engrossed by the mania that their only
duty was, _fas aut nefas_, to aid the rebellion which was smouldering
in Ireland. This had been the general opinion regarding their motive.
But now it was seen at last that they had been acting in accordance
with a consistent plan to do nothing and say nothing which could be
construed as unfriendly to the revolutionists. How much influence did
they possess with their own compatriots and with the revolutionary
leaders? That was the question which the Cabinet determined to settle.
They were summoned to the White House, and their good offices besought
by the President in person.
In other times, the spectacle of the President of the United States
begging a dozen Irish politicians to intercede with a mob for the
safety of the Republic would have been received with derision. But
the people never heard of this last shame upon them. The newspapers,
excepting those whose sympathies were with the revolutionists, had
been among the first to go down in the general wreck. The ordinary
means of spreading information among the people had ceased to exist,
and whatever news was published was colored and distorted by the
prejudices of the socialist and Irish editors, who alone were allowed
to continue their business.
The Irish members thus appealed to asked time for consideration and for
consultation with other Irish leaders; but they promised that there
should be no disturbance of the Government in Washington till their
answer was ready. Transportation was irregular and slow. The railroads
had suffered not only in material and men, but in the practical
annihilation of their business by the riots. The Irish members set out
for New York by such routes as were most practicable, arriving there
the second morning after leaving Washington. A hastily called meeting
of Irish leaders in the metropolis heard their statements of the
condition of affairs at the capital. The conference lasted all that day
and far into the following night. Messengers were constantly hurrying
around the city, summoning additional advisers from among the best
known of the dynamiters. Several prominent socialists and a few not so
well known at the time were seen to enter the hall where the conference
was held.
On the fifth day after their first summons to the White House the
ambassadors returned to Washington. They were tired out and travel
stained, but they repaired at once to the executive mansion. The
President met them with an anxious face. During their absence nothing
had arrived from the States to give him encouragement. Instead of
being able to offer the National Government any assistance, the State
Governments, many of them in flight from their own capitals, were
anxiously calling on it to extricate them from their own difficulties.
Without any attempt to smooth over or disguise the harshness of their
message, the Irish members laid before the President the ultimatum
of the Irish societies. They demanded the appointment of O’Halloran
“Patsy,” of New York, as Secretary of State, and Cincinnatus Wagner,
of Illinois, as Secretary of War, in place of the then incumbents.
O’Halloran had for some time been known as the real executive head
of the Irish societies. His appointment would conciliate them. The
appointment of Mr. Wagner they believed would be received as an
overture of peace by the socialistic organizations. They professed to
have no authority to speak for these latter, but insisted upon Mr.
Wagner’s appointment as strenuously as upon that of Mr. O’Halloran.
With these two men in the Cabinet, they had no doubt the revolutionists
would meet the Government half way in arranging at least a truce upon
the basis of the _statu quo_. Anyhow, if the terms suggested were
accepted, and the President agreed to be governed by the advice of the
men named, they were willing to guarantee that in twenty days the Irish
societies alone would furnish the Government with a force sufficient
to protect itself and to begin the task of re-establishing order. If
the terms proposed were not accepted, they felt bound to warn the
Government that it must prepare to defend itself from immediate and
powerful attack.
Astounded at the audacity of the demand thus made upon him, the
President at first peremptorily refused to consider it. Congressman
Hagarty, of Chicago, who acted as spokesman for the party, replied
only by calling his attention to the hopeless situation the Government
was in without the aid offered. The President sought to temporize.
Was it not possible to modify the terms proposed? He was told that
modification was out of the question; that the proposition made him was
the result of a conference with nearly all the leaders of the various
Irish societies; and that the men who had acted merely as messengers
were powerless to alter it in any way. The President asked how it was
possible to reach O’Halloran and Wagner and secure their presence in
Washington in time to be of avail. He was informed that O’Halloran
had returned from New York with the Irish members, and was at that
moment waiting to know whether he should remain or return to New York,
while Wagner had been telegraphed before they left New York to meet
the President at Washington, and would arrive in the course of a few
hours. The President still refused to accept the Irish proposition, but
was persuaded to consult with the Cabinet before returning a definite
answer.
The Irish members retired, and messengers summoned the President’s
advisers to the White House. The Cabinet meeting was a long and gloomy
one. From no quarter of the political heavens was a single ray of
light apparent. Plan after plan was proposed, discussed, and abandoned
as impracticable. Day was breaking in the east when the Secretary
of State, with a firm voice but a haggard face, rose and expressed
his belief that no chance remained unless by the acceptance of the
Irish terms to gain perhaps a little time. It was not possible, he
said, that the revolutionists comprised a majority of the people.
They would grow constantly weaker, and the internal dissensions which
were sure to arise would divide them, perhaps set them fighting
among themselves. Every day’s delay offered at least a chance to
strengthen the Government and unite the friends of good order, still
in a scattered and demoralized condition. He advised that the Irish
terms be accepted, and O’Halloran and Wagner invited to the Cabinet.
His resignation was at the President’s disposal. The Secretary of War
briefly expressed his agreement, and also tendered his resignation.
When the Senate met, at noon, the President sent in the names of
O’Halloran and Wagner as nominees for the places demanded. One of the
Irish members who had been sent to New York volunteered to take the
message from the White House to the Capitol. Many of the senators
were absent, having hurried from Washington in order to protect their
families when the first general outbreak occurred. But a quorum
remained. An executive session was ordered the moment the message was
received. Before the Irish member who bore the document presented
it, he had carefully interpolated a sentence which was construed
by the Senate as a threat on the President’s part to resign if the
nominations were not confirmed. It was supposed by the Senate to be
a genuine part of the message. Under its influence, and despite the
astonishment caused by the character of the nominations, they were
speedily confirmed.
Without ceremony the new secretaries took possession of their offices.
Messages were despatched in the name of the Government to the heads of
Irish organizations all over the country, ordering them at once to send
men, fully armed and equipped, to Washington for Government service.
O’Halloran drew up a proclamation, signing it with the President’s name
as well as his own, and affixing the great seal of the United States,
calling on all insurgents “in the name of the Republic, by the hope
they cherish of carrying liberty to their oppressed kindred beyond the
sea, and as the surest and speediest way of securing the rights of all
the down-trodden,” to lay down their arms and send delegates to a great
peace convention, which he announced would be held at Washington on
the first secular day of the next month, October. He did not go through
the formality of showing this document to the President, but hurried
it to the telegraph office for circulation over the country. For days
the Government had been unable to transmit messages to New York, on
account of the control which the insurgents held of the wires. But this
pronunciamento met with no delay. It is a fact that copies had been
struck off in the form of placards, and were being read on the streets
of New York before the President knew that a proclamation had been
issued.
X.
THE LAST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
STATES.
It is needless to say that the President did not endure with silence
this ignoring of his rank and, in fact, of his very existence. He
sent for O’Halloran, who appeared at the White House, accompanied by
Wagner, Congressmen Hagarty, Tomlinson, and several other ardent and
influential Irish “patriots.” This gathering of the clans warned the
President that O’Halloran understood the purpose for which he had been
summoned, and was prepared with a reply and a backing. Nevertheless,
the President did not hesitate to rebuke him in sharp words for his
imprudence and meddlesomeness.
O’Halloran’s response was an angry declaration that he had assumed
office at the President’s request, and with the implied understanding
that his policy was to be that of the Administration. If he was
not wanted, if his policy was not to be accepted, he would decline
to retain the secretaryship, and would leave the President to his
own devices. So, he added, would the Secretary of War. Mr. Wagner
truculently confirmed this remark of his colleague. O’Halloran’s
friends joined uninvited in the debate, which soon became undignified
and angry on both sides. It ended by O’Halloran flaming into a
simulated but apparently uncontrollable rage and defying the President.
An Irish regiment, which had left New York for Washington in suspicious
proximity to the departure of “Patsy” and the Irish members of
Congress after their conference in that city, had that morning arrived
at Washington and was encamped on the Mall. O’Halloran begged the
President to take notice of this regiment’s presence, and of the fact,
hitherto not mentioned, that twenty thousand more armed men of the same
race and actuated by the same spirit were, under his orders, _en route_
for the capital. They were his followers. They would obey him. He would
see if the Administration could safely deny its promises to him, and
fail to sustain him in whatever course he saw fit to undertake. “When
you send for me next on such an errand as this, I will bring them with
me,” he shouted. Turning his back on the President, he strode out of
the White House, followed by his friends, who had been at no pains to
conceal their hearty approval of his defiance and his threat.
O’Halloran proceeded straight to the Irish camp on the Mall. The
President, summoning a public carriage, whose movements would attract
no attention, drove to the residence of the Ex-Secretary of State. A
few other friends and prominent men were called in. While they were
debating what steps should be pursued under the new circumstances
which had arisen, information reached them that two more bodies of men
had arrived at the Pennsylvania station, one, like the regiment then on
the Mall, unquestionably Irish, the other as indubitably composed of
German and Austrian socialists. They were marching in a certain order
and discipline to join the body already in the city. Other messengers
brought the news that O’Halloran was in close and secret conference
with the officer commanding the regiment then in camp on the Mall.
It was clear that the President was in personal danger, and that a
deliberate plot to overthrow his authority was in process of execution.
With the few national troops at his command it would be impossible for
him to protect the Government buildings and property, or even to defend
any one of them against the attacks of the armed revolutionists already
in the city, reinforced by the local socialists and Irish, and in
constant receipt of additional forces from all directions, even then in
motion towards Washington under orders from O’Halloran and Wagner.
Hastily and secretly preparations were made for leaving the capital.
A few of the most important documents from the executive office and
a few bundles of treasury notes were packed into trunks. Orders were
sent to the general officer commanding the regulars in and about the
city, directing him to evacuate it as early as possible that night and
to set out for Richmond, destroying railroad tracks and bridges behind
him. At nightfall the President, accompanied by the loyal members of
his Cabinet and the heads of several bureaus, all in closed carriages,
drove across Long Bridge and took the cars at a small Virginia station
for Richmond.
Swift and secret as their movements had been, however, they were
discovered by the revolutionists, who instantly threw off every
disguise of loyalty with which they had thus far masked their treason.
The regulars, marching to the river soon after ten o’clock, found the
bridge torn up and a large force gathered to dispute their passage.
It was only after severe skirmishing that they succeeded in re-laying
enough of the scattered planks to enable them to cross. Arriving on the
other side, they found that the engines and cars which had been sent
across earlier in the evening to await them had been dismantled and
the tracks torn up. Leaving all their _impedimenta_ behind them, the
troops set out on foot across the country, the officers, in the absence
of cavalry, acting as scouts and pushing ahead to endeavor to discover
some means of transportation. This they were unable to do; and it was
not till the fourth day after leaving Washington that the footsore and
weary troops finally marched into Richmond. They found that city in
ruins, the work of a revolutionary mob which had risen in obedience
to orders from Washington the day after the President’s arrival. They
also found that the President had escaped, but that the party which
accompanied him had been compelled to separate and fly in different
directions, no one could tell them whither.
In desperation, they turned towards the mountains of West Virginia
and Tennessee. The population there had always been loyal, and had
healthfully resisted the revolutionary infection; the mountains
themselves afforded opportunities for defence, and possibly for the
gathering of an army which, with the regulars as a nucleus, might be
able to make some successful stand against the revolutionists. After
another toilsome march, about fifteen hundred of the soldiers succeeded
in reaching the mountains, though closely pursued by greatly superior
numbers of the rebels.
In the mean time the President had been stealthily conveyed to a
farm-house, some twenty miles from Richmond, belonging to a loyal
gentleman of that city, with the intention of sending him farther
South by the earliest opportunity. During the night he was attacked
by pneumonia. Enfeebled by physical weariness and mental strain, he
rapidly sank. His identity was concealed to the last, and, excepting
the gentleman in whose house he lay and the physician who attended him,
not one of the inmates knew that under that roof the last President
of the United States passed away. Even after his death the secret was
kept, and his fate was never made known to the revolutionary leaders,
who had themselves fallen before the story was told.
While one portion of the revolutionary forces at Washington had been
disputing the passage of the regulars into Virginia at Long Bridge,
another portion was scouring the city and arresting the members of
Congress who remained and could be found. Few of them knew what had
happened, and their capture was easy. When the next morning dawned, it
found all the Congressmen, except those in secret sympathy with the
revolution, herded in the District jail, and the building surrounded by
armed detachments from the revolutionary forces.
XI.
A PRECIOUS TRIUMVIRATE.
O’Halloran and Wagner issued another proclamation. This time it was
addressed directly to the “revolutionary army” and to the allied
organizations in sympathy with the new order of things. It announced
the flight of the Administration and the withdrawal of the national
troops. Its signers declared, with audacious and impudent hypocrisy,
that they deplored the disorder and destruction of property which had
followed the revolution in many cities, and which they feared might be
imitated in Washington unless immediate steps were taken to carry on
the government. The various organizations engaged in the revolt were
again invited to send delegates to an October “peace convention.”
In the mean time O’Halloran and Wagner summoned Herr Van Liest, a
prominent anarchistic agitator, to join them, and announced that
the triumvirate so composed would administer the government till a
permanent arrangement should be perfected.
In this disposition of authority, as in all the subsequent procedure
of the revolutionists, the apparent disappearance from the scene of
action of that mysterious leader calling himself the “Council of
Seven,” whose edicts had been the controlling force in the riotous
inauguration of the outbreak at Chicago, was one of the most perplexing
features. It gave rise at first to the suspicion that his identity was
concealed in the person of one of the three new rulers. This, however,
was not so generally accepted as the theory that they were simply
the instruments he had chosen through which to work out the schemes
plotted in his secret councils,--the tools with which he, still unseen
and undiscovered, did his work. Whatever the explanation, certain it is
that from this time forward the apparent leadership of the revolution
centred in the Washington triumvirate, from whom emanated the only
orders which were obeyed by the allied hordes of sedition and anarchy.
The bells in the few churches which the socialists had left standing
were rung, cannon fired, and bonfires made in several cities over the
revolutionary success. Herr Liest hastened to Washington, accompanied
by Julius Kopf, a beer-selling socialist, Petrovitch Metron, a
dynamite “professor,” and many other equally malignant anarchists. The
country was fast in the power of a triple combination representing
fanatical hatred of law and order, foreign revengefulness, and native
corruption,--all in their worst forms. But the leaders, fanatics
and zealots though they were, had foresight enough to see that the
alliance could not last unless its continuance were constrained
by the pressure of outside danger. All of them had animosities to
gratify against foreign Governments. Their desire of vengeance and the
necessity of self-preservation united in urging them to foreign wars.
XII.
WAR WITH ENGLAND.
Most of the foreign representatives had fled from Washington during
the stormy scenes which followed the departure of the President. But
the English, German, and French ministers remained, confiding in the
protection of their national flags, and actuated by a sense of duty
towards their fellow-countrymen in the United States, who were more
numerous than those of other nationalities. They were speedily shown
that revenge was a stronger motive in the breasts of the new rulers
than prudence.
Even before the arrival of Herr Liest in Washington, O’Halloran,
smarting under the memory of British prisons and the wound an English
enemy had inflicted on him, had cabled to London a long message, signed
by his own name alone, and addressed to “The British Government,”
demanding the instant release of certain specified criminals and
prisoners waiting trial in British jails, on the ground that they
were American citizens. Of course no notice was taken of the message
in London; but without twenty-four hours’ delay for the receipt of
an answer, if one should be made, O’Halloran ordered the arrest of
the British minister then at Washington. The astounded diplomat was
informed of the message which had been sent to London, and told that
he would be confined until a satisfactory answer was received. If the
demand was not granted in full within sixty days, he was threatened
with trial by court-martial on the charge of complicity in the
Englishman’s assault upon the Irish agitator. He was informed that
he might send his Government such account of his imprisonment as he
saw fit; and he was also at liberty to add that, in the event of the
British Government’s refusal to accede to the Irish-American terms,
not only would he (the minister) assuredly forfeit his life, but ships
and men enough would be sent to Ireland from American ports to effect
the release of the prisoners specified, by whatever force might be
necessary. The minister availed himself of the privilege offered him,
and sent a long despatch from his cell to the British Foreign Office.
The English Government and the English people had been enraged already
to the utmost limit of endurance by the unfriendly indifference of
the Washington authorities to the dynamite outrages in England, which
had been planned in American cities by American citizens, paid for
by American contributions, and carried out by American agents. This
affront to England’s accredited representative and its flag was more
than could be endured for a moment. The Cabinet was in consultation
when the minister’s despatch arrived in Downing Street. It was
supplemented within a couple of hours by another from the secretary of
the legation, corroborating the arrest of the minister and giving the
additional particulars that the embassy had been forcibly entered by a
band of armed men acting under O’Halloran’s instructions, and all its
papers and records removed.
Parliament was in session. That night the news from America was
announced to both Houses, and the Government stated that it would be
prepared at the next evening’s sitting to ask for a vote of credit.
This declaration was received with loud applause. In the Commons, an
Opposition member was instantly on his feet with the notice that he
would on the next day move that the outrage committed on England’s
representative demanded swift and summary vengeance. A member of the
Cabinet dryly remarked that perhaps the Government would by that time
have something to propose rather more to the point. The retort was
greeted with louder cheers than ever; and before Parliament adjourned
for the night it was clear that a declaration of war was the matter of
but a few hours in the future.
The minister’s arrest took place on the second of September. When
Parliament met on the third, the Government announced that war existed
between Great Britain and the United States by the act of the latter
Power, and asked a credit of twenty millions sterling to maintain
British prestige and avenge British wrongs. The few Irish members who
retained seats in Parliament attempted to use their customary dilatory
tactics. For once they were cowed by the roar of indignant derision
which greeted them from floor and galleries. In actual fear of personal
peril, they gave over their “filibustering,” and shortly slunk out of
the House. There was no division. Without a single dissentient voice
the credit asked for by the Government was voted. When the Speaker
declared it carried, the Secretary of War rose and stated that the
utmost exertions of the Government had been set in motion, even before
the vote was taken, to put every war vessel in its possession in
readiness for service, and that over three thousand active seamen had
volunteered that day to serve on the expedition which would shortly be
sent across the Atlantic. The news flew to every hamlet in the United
Kingdom, and the next day saw an outburst of loyal zeal such as was
never witnessed in England before. Within four days more than two
thousand steam ocean-going vessels had been offered to the Government
for use as troop-ships in conveying soldiers across the Atlantic. The
same spirit which actuated the ship-owners moved every other class,
and the Government found all the wealth of the nation and all its men
freely dedicated to the war.
The very day that witnessed the British Government’s acceptance of the
war saw another complication added to affairs at Washington. The two
ministers of France and Germany visited the White House, where the
triumvirate, O’Halloran, Wagner, and Herr Liest, had taken up their
quarters, to urge upon them the folly of their course in arresting
the English minister, and to plead for his release and dismissal from
the country. It happened that Liest and Kopf were angrily reproaching
O’Halloran, at the very moment of their arrival, for his action in
involving the revolutionists in a war with Great Britain while the
cause of their brethren in Germany was utterly neglected.
When the German minister entered and began his plea for his English
colleague, Herr Liest took the answer out of O’Halloran’s mouth,
and began a fiery tirade against Germany and the German Government.
The diplomat listened in amazement for a few minutes; then, without
deigning a word of reply, turned his back on the party and stalked
haughtily out of the room, followed by his French colleague. The
moment they had gone, Herr Liest, with his voice rising to a shriek,
in a frenzy of anger demanded that they both be treated as the English
minister had been. Kopf seconded the demand with a vehemence as great
as Liest’s. O’Halloran attempted to calm their passion and point out to
them the impolicy of angering at the same moment three of the strongest
Powers of the world. They would not listen to him. Instead, they
taunted him with showing weakness in the common cause. Wagner sided
with them, though less violently. O’Halloran saw that it would not be
safe for him to give them the chance to accuse him of lack of energy
or zeal. A guard was hastily sent after the diplomats, and they were
incarcerated in the same jail which held the British minister.
The moment this was done, the revolutionists saw that they must
hasten, if they were to strike the first blow against their old-time
European “oppressors,” before attack should be made on them from
abroad. Acting under orders sent out by the three self-appointed
dictators, detachments from various revolutionary organizations at the
different seaports seized possession of all foreign vessels lying at
their wharves. The officers were put in confinement and the crews sent
ashore, except such as chose to enlist in the revolutionary service.
Cannon of every sort were dragged aboard them, and they set out in
fleets from every Atlantic port to prey on whatever commerce might fall
in their path.
The moment he had assumed the duties of secretary of war, Mr. Wagner
had set about the organization of an army. He passed over the usual
authorities. Not a message was sent to the governor of a single State.
Nowhere was the militia ordered out, nor volunteers asked for, nor
a draft ordered. The various Irish and socialistic societies were
notified that men were wanted, and their answers were prompt. Camps
were formed near New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago,
Cincinnati, St. Louis, and other cities. In them rapidly gathered
motley armies of Irish dynamiters, German socialists, French and
Italian communists, with here and there Russian nihilists, Swiss
anarchists, and outlaws of every nationality. With these mingled a
larger proportion than two years before would have been regarded as
possible, of native-born workmen who had been inveigled into the
revolutionary ranks by the plausible pleadings of agitators, or driven
into them by their own sufferings and wrongs. Among the Irish were a
few who had served in the armies of 1861–1865; but in the main these
camps were noticeable for the absence of men who had seen service in
the cause of their country during the civil war. Still their numbers
were formidable. Altogether, they mustered something over five hundred
thousand men, armed with such weapons as the arsenals which they had
looted could furnish, and obedient enough to the orders sent out from
Washington, so long as those orders did not conflict with those of
“the Old Man.” And it was no longer a secret that such conflict was
impossible, inasmuch as the triumvirate there were known to be but
puppets in the hand of that mysterious central authority.
Meanwhile, in several quarters attempts to organize bodies from the
population opposed to the revolutionists had been crushed with terrible
cruelty. Except such weapons as chanced to be in their possession
before the outbreak, it was impossible for the really patriotic people
of the land to find arms and ammunition, or even to organize. Every
attempt on their part to meet in large numbers was prevented. Guerilla
bands lurked among the mountains in States which afforded them such
shelter. Thence they maintained a desultory warfare on such small
bodies of revolutionists as they could safely attack. No quarter was
shown them; they showed none in return. Civil war raged in every
congressional district,--it might almost be said in every town. But all
the great centres of communication were in the undisputed possession of
the revolutionists. The depots of supplies were in their hands; they
held all the arsenals; they had confiscated the public treasure. It is
probable that the patriots really outnumbered the revolutionists; but
they were without arms, they lacked money, they lacked supplies, they
lacked organization. The revolutionists spared no pains, hesitated at
no tyranny, forbore no cruelty which promised to keep them deprived of
arms and to prevent combinations among them.
XIII.
CAPTURE OF BOSTON.
The month of September wore away. October came, and with it the opening
of the “peace convention” which O’Halloran had called on the first
day of his power at Washington. But its sessions were cut short by
the unexpectedly speedy action of England. On the declaration of the
British Government that war existed with the United States, cable
communication between the United Kingdom and the United States had
been broken. The arrest of the French and German ministers had caused
irrepressible indignation in the Governments they represented, and the
refusal of the triumvirate in power at Washington to heed their demands
for reparation and apology had been followed by almost simultaneous
declarations of war from Paris and Berlin. All communication with
the United States from any part of their dominions was peremptorily
forbidden. No news could be received from Europe except by roundabout
and tedious routes, and little was known of what was being done there;
but no one among the revolutionary leaders dreamed of a blow being
struck before the opening of the ensuing spring.
It was therefore with something like stupefaction that they heard, on
the morning of the very day on which their farcical “peace convention”
met, of the arrival in the port of Halifax of a powerful British
fleet, consisting of seventeen armored fighting ships and thirty of
the largest steamships formerly plying across the Atlantic, which had
been transformed for the time being into troop-ships, conveying an army
of twenty-eight thousand men and an immense amount of ammunition and
warlike supplies. This fleet, said the first despatch which was handed
to O’Halloran just before he rose to open the convention, was coaling
up as rapidly as the conveniences in the port would permit, evidently
with the intention of making a speedy descent at some point on the
American coast. O’Halloran showed the despatch to Wagner; but both
considered that it must be a hoax. It was impossible, they agreed, that
England could have had a fleet in readiness and transports at hand, and
men and arms prepared so as to strike across the three thousand miles
of intervening sea within a month from the date on which hostilities
had been declared. They consequently decided to ignore the despatch.
But other despatches soon followed, confirming the news. They came from
such sources that even O’Halloran was convinced of their entire truth.
Summoning the two other members of “the Government,” he laid his
additional information before them.
Nothing had been done to strengthen the defences of a single seaport
along the eastern border of the land. Built many years before, and
to withstand the fire of comparatively small guns, the forts which
stood at the entrances of the Atlantic harbors were practically of no
offensive or defensive value whatever. They could neither withstand
the shot of modern guns nor reply with missiles likely to injure in
the slightest degree the sides of modern armored vessels. There was
not, in all the waters of the world, a navy flying the American flag
which was able, unitedly, to combat the weakest of the ironclads
named as making up the English power at Halifax. Upon the first
outbreak in April, the little band of regular-army officers engaged
in experiments with torpedoes at various stations along the coast had
been compelled to join their regiments, and had not since returned
to their experiments. The Revolutionary Government had done nothing
except issue “subventions” to a few long-haired, half-crazed socialists
and dynamiters to enable them to continue pottering and unscientific
attempts at the invention of new explosives. There were not experienced
gunners enough in the entire revolutionary army to man completely and
to work efficiently the guns in half the forts along the coast, such as
they were.
It was naturally assumed that New York, the richest city of the country
and the real centre of the revolution, would be the first object of
British attack. There were already about one hundred and fifty thousand
men in or about the city. They were hastily sent to the forts of the
harbor. Orders from Washington set a hundred thousand more in motion
towards the metropolis from Western cities. Canal-barges and tow-boats
were seized, loaded with stone, and sunk across the channel at the
Narrows. Others were loaded with petroleum and made ready for use as
fire-ships to send against the attacking fleet.
The convention speedily broke up. It held two sessions, but these were
spent in wordy wrangles; they failed to result in even the choice of
a presiding officer. The real leaders of the revolutionists hurried
towards the East on the confirmation of the news from Halifax. Others
followed in rapid succession, till, on the second day, less than half
the delegates remained in Washington. The convention dissolved. It did
not adjourn, it simply ceased to exist.
But Admiral Seymour, who commanded the British fleet, did not aim at
New York. While the revolutionists there were working with the energy
of desperation to block the approach to their water-front, he turned
into Boston Harbor, and, a little before noon, the 8th of October,
fired his first shot into Fort Warren, the structure defending the
lower main channel. The little garrison in the fort responded bravely
for an hour, but they could do nothing to harm the British fleet.
Their numbers were small, their guns old-fashioned and weak, and
their ammunition was soon spent. Their missiles seldom reached the
sides of the British vessels; when they did, they rebounded and fell
off as if they had been nothing worse than pebbles. The British fire
was not rapid at first, but terribly exact, and the fleet steadily
drew to closer quarters. The leading vessels approached within less
than a fourth of a mile of the fort. Their fire became more rapid and
destructive. The garrison was driven from the casemates and compelled
to retreat under such shelter as could be found. The flag was shot
away. A landing-party from the fleet rowed down upon the fort, under
the fire their own vessels were pouring into it. Before they reached
it, a white flag appeared on the walls, and firing ceased. The fort
surrendered.
Leaving a few men to dismantle it and destroy the magazine, the fleet
proceeded up the harbor without meeting further resistance. Its
appearance off the outer light had been announced in the city during
the morning, and every road to the North and West was blocked by flying
fugitives, who expected each moment to hear the shriek of British
shells hurtling above them through the air. Admiral Seymour drew up in
front of the city and within a quarter of a mile of the wharves, each
vessel swinging broadside to and anchoring bow and stern. The guns were
manned; and in this position he waited an hour for any message that
might be sent him from the shore.
But the mayor of Boston was himself an Irishman who had become known as
a sympathizer in the dynamite outrages. He had made several virulent
speeches against England and in eulogy of the “Irish martyrs,” as it
was the custom of his kind to denominate such murderers as were hanged
for assassinating landlords in Ireland or blowing up women and children
in London. He dared not show himself on board an English war-vessel.
In truth, he had been among the first to flee the city on the news of
the English approach. The city council had been hurriedly convened; but
time was wasted in a search for him before his flight became known.
During this hour of waiting, a party of young and reckless Irish
bravos had managed to steal unobserved into Fort Independence. This
was an antiquated stone fort in the upper harbor, entirely deserted,
and mounting a few harmless cannon. With these they began firing upon
the nearest British vessels. Their missiles had no more effect on the
armored war-ships than pop-guns could have had on Achilles’ shield;
but they ended the respite which Admiral Seymour had given the city.
A shell from his flag-ship was the signal for a volley from the whole
fleet. But the second round had not been fired when a white flag was
seen moving down Long Wharf and a party of men taking a boat. An
alderman boarded the flag-ship and begged that no further destruction
be done, as the city was defenceless and no opposition would be offered
to the operations of the fleet. In fact, he begged that a guard might
be landed at once to take possession of the public buildings and save
them from utter destruction in the disorder which was rampant once more
in the city, and which the authorities could not repress.
Night had already begun to fall; nevertheless a strong party of marines
was landed from the fleet. Most of the public buildings had been
destroyed by the mob during the outbreaks in the summer; but the State
House was still standing, though its interior had been dismantled, and
the post-office was intact. These buildings were taken possession of,
and put in readiness for defence against any attacks such as might be
made by a mob; small garrisons were left in them, and other bodies
encamped on the famous “Common” and in the Public Garden.
The next morning’s dawn saw the harbor black with the smoke of a score
of transports, from which whole brigades of red-coated soldiers were
disembarked at Long Wharf. As fast as landed they were marched through
the city and pushed out beyond the suburbs in every direction, where
they began the work of fortifying themselves. From Hingham to Revere,
earthworks were thrown up and mounted with guns taken from the forts
in the harbor and pieces brought by the invaders. Describing a vast
semicircle, these fortifications cut off every landward approach to
the city. Detached forts were built on strategic points in advance of
the general line, and behind the semicircle a double line of railway
track was laid, so that every point of the fortifications was within
half an hour of relief from any other post. Transports arrived almost
daily with fresh troops and munitions. The city was turned into a vast
British camp, and evidence soon came that it had been chosen as the
winter quarters, from which operations would be begun in the spring.
General Wood, of Afghan and African fame, arrived a few days later and
assumed command.
The revolutionists had not allowed this work to proceed without making
all the trouble they could. As soon as the attack on Boston had
developed itself, large detachments had been hurried from New York to
the assistance of the small number which had been left watching the
New England metropolis. But transportation was so slow and facilities
so inadequate that they found the British in force occupying the most
important positions around the city, and already strongly fortified,
before they could gather strength sufficient to warrant an attack. They
brought with them only field-pieces in the way of artillery, and were
overmatched even by the old-fashioned guns from the harbor forts with
which many of the earthworks had been mounted. From these guns the
English gunners constantly dropped shells among them, reaching their
camps at a distance from which they could make no reply. One or two
desperate assaults were made on the intrenchments; but a near approach
showed that these were not only mounted with numerous long-range
pieces, but that their parapets fairly bristled with Gatling guns and
mitrailleuses, which mowed the assailants down in actual swaths as
they came within rifle-shot. Hopeless of success, the revolutionists
sullenly retired to Worcester, Springfield, Providence, and other
interior cities, and the Washington triumvirate prepared to wait till
spring. Then they hoped to muster a force great enough to overwhelm, by
sheer weight of numbers, all the British who might be sent across the
sea.
When the city was first captured, a number of prominent Irish leaders
had been seized by the troops under Admiral Seymour. In one of the
assaults made on the British earthworks in Medford, a few days later,
about two hundred revolutionists, including two officers calling
themselves generals, had been captured. They were conveyed to the
jail on Charles Street, and incarcerated with the Irishmen previously
arrested. The next day General Wood called the city council together at
his headquarters, which had been fixed in the State House, and directed
them to inform the General Government at Washington, “or the persons
in whose custody the English minister and his colleagues of France and
Germany are detained,” that these prisoners would be held as hostages
for the safe keeping and delivery of the diplomats within British
lines. Furthermore, the council was advised that all non-combatants
would do well to remove from the city, as the general would not be
responsible for the preservation of the city itself should news arrive
of any harm to these foreign representatives. For themselves, they were
relieved from their offices, as the city was to be put under martial law.
When the winter opened it found Boston turned into a British fortress,
without a trace of self-government left, with its streets guarded
by detachments of British soldiers, and all its public affairs
administered by a board of British officers. Nevertheless, there was
better order and less suffering under the management of these foreign
invaders than were experienced in any of the cities in which the
revolutionists retained control. Business revived under the stimulus
of the presence of a large army, and merchants, despite the menace of
Admiral Seymour’s warning, which still hung over the city, felt more
confidence than they had known for many a month. Throughout the rest
of the land the control of the revolutionists was supreme, except in
some of the rural portions, where small bands, composed of those who
had once been the best and most loyal citizens, disputed their rule and
maintained themselves by a sort of guerilla warfare.
During the winter several of these bands united in the upper portions
of Vermont and New Hampshire, and succeeded in opening communication
with others in New York, Ohio, and the Southern States. The old spirit
of republicanism was found stronger in the South than in any other
portion of the country, and the revolutionists were proportionately
weaker there. A considerable force of loyalists was known to be lurking
in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. Slowly the hope grew that a
combination might be effected between the scattered bands in the North
and West and these in Tennessee, which would be recruited rapidly from
the South, and which might attain sufficient size to warrant a movement
against the revolutionists, now distracted by the British attack. Among
the patriots were many officers of the regular army and a considerable
number of veterans who had seen service on both sides in the civil war
of 1861–1865. Their efforts were devoted to drilling and instructing
the loyalists in such simple and rudimentary tactics as could be taught
to them individually or at the occasional and secret meetings when a
few score could be collected without danger of discovery. With great
difficulty and in the face of apparently insuperable obstacles, two
armies, of about eighteen and thirty thousand men respectively, were at
last collected in northern New England and western New York. If they
could be united, and especially if the loyal forces, which were known
to have increased to some eight or ten thousand in eastern Tennessee,
could be joined with them, and the command of the whole army put into
an experienced officer’s hands, it was felt that there was a chance for
striking a blow which should inspirit the loyal people all over the
country and make possible a general uprising against the brutal and
cruel and utterly irresponsible rule of the revolutionists. This scheme
was carried out toward the close of the winter in so far as the union
of the two northern bands was concerned. But it was found impracticable
for them to join the Southern force, or for it to reach them, until
spring opened. Before that time other events occurred, which must now
be chronicled.
XIV.
THE EUROPEAN COALITION.
France and Germany had replied to the outrage upon their
plenipotentiaries at Washington by almost simultaneous declarations of
war. But their action came later than that of England, and it was felt
by each Government to be impossible for it to do anything of importance
before the coming spring. Moreover, it was a grave question how they
should act so as to avoid the possibility of complications with each
other and with England, whose fleet and army were already actively
engaged. Each Government detached a small fleet with instructions
to harass the coast, seize as much American shipping as possible,
capture privateers, and destroy supplies. But they were not to
attempt any serious warfare until further details should be arranged.
The diplomatic correspondence which followed showed that all three
Governments were impressed with the danger, not only to themselves,
but also to civilization, of allowing the American excesses to go
unpunished.
The maniacs who had secured control of affairs in the western
hemisphere had practically declared war against the whole world and
against civilization itself. It was found that the other European
Powers sympathized with England, Germany, and France in their feeling
that the revolution must be crushed out at any cost, and so completely
that there should be no danger of its reviving. Hardly a Government in
Europe but had had experience with the men now in power in America. Not
a Government in Europe but knew that in its own dominions thousands
of other socialists and anarchists were waiting the triumph of their
brethren across the water to rise themselves in fierce revolt.
Early in January a conference representing all the European Governments
was held at Berlin. Representatives from Russia, Austria, Spain, and
Italy were there, as well as from England, France, and Germany. For
once the instinct of self-preservation overcame the hereditary distrust
of these generally antagonistic Powers. The debates of the conference
were characterized by a plainness of speech, a directness and unanimity
of agreement, and a promptness of action which were new to the history
of diplomacy. It sat but five days. During that time it perfected a
European alliance in which all the nations represented united for
the object of crushing the anarchistic revolution in America. It was
decided that the actual conduct of the war should be left to the
three Powers already involved; but the other Governments agreed to
close their ports to American vessels, to refuse supplies for use in
America, and to sustain in every way short of actual war the Powers
which should act in behalf of Europe in the field and on the ocean.
Of the three nations already at war with the revolutionists, England
was unquestionably the greatest Naval Power. It was determined that the
united fleet of the allies should be put under the command of Admiral
Seymour, already in American waters. Germany and France forgot their
traditional hatred for the time, and vied with each other as to which
should succeed in relinquishing to the other the supreme authority over
the army. It was finally agreed that General Count von Blücken, the
strategist who had succeeded to the command of the German army, should
have control in the field, with a staff comprising an equal number of
French, German, and English officers.
Before the middle of January, 1888, the arrangements perfected by the
conference had been ratified by the various Governments interested,
and preparations were being pushed rapidly forward for the spring
campaign. General Sir Evelyn Wood had been put in command of the
British forces in and around Boston. Admiral Seymour returned to London
early in January, and held a long consultation there with General Wood,
General von Blücken, and General de l’Isle, who was to command the
French contingent. Long Island Sound, itself an immense land-locked
harbor, was selected as the rendezvous of the fleets. On the northern
shore of the Sound was marked out the point for the collection of the
army. Before the end of February Seymour returned to America. He was
accompanied by considerable reinforcements for the British garrison
in Boston. Within a week after his departure the first convoy of the
allies sailed from Havre. It consisted of seven powerful ships of war
and a fleet of transports under their protection, bearing nearly fifty
thousand men. Only a day later the first German contingent sailed from
Bremen.
Day by day and week by week others followed. The allies knew that
they had undertaken a Herculean task in the subjugation of the United
States, torn and divided though its once impregnable power had become.
They determined to make no mistake in underestimating the resistance
which they were likely to meet. Before the end of April they had in
the Sound, occupying various harbors along its shores, a fleet of one
hundred and twenty men-of-war. On shore, including the British troops
garrisoning Boston, they had an army of half a million men, all trained
soldiers, all armed with the most perfect weapons which modern science
had discovered and modern skill invented, and in receipt, even after
that enormous number had been reached, of constant reinforcements.
Practically no opposition had been offered to their landing along the
Connecticut shore. The revolutionists had no information of the point
which the fleet intended to strike, and naturally assumed that Boston,
which was already in foreign hands, would be selected as the base of
the contemplated invasion. When they discovered their error it was too
late to make a hopeful defence. They contented themselves, therefore,
with strengthening their fortifications around New York, and calling
to that city as many of their men as could be spared from watching the
British at Boston and the patriots in the interior parts of the country.
The loyalists, it need not be said, viewed this invasion of foreign
troops with almost as much alarm as they had felt at the uprising of
the native revolutionists. There had been division in their councils
before this. The news of the European alliance still more completely
split them into factions. One party frankly owned that they regarded a
foreign conquest as vastly preferable to a continuance of revolutionary
rule. The other party, though hating the revolutionists with equal
hatred, asked what was likely to be the result upon the fortunes of
the Republic of a victory by the foreign allies. Long and anxious
discussions were held during the latter portion of the winter and the
early weeks of spring. Attempts were made to ascertain the intentions
of the allies in case they should defeat the revolutionists; but no
one among the invaders was found who could undertake to answer that
question. Many left the little band of patriots and returned to their
homes, refusing to share longer in a movement which could not be
regarded as anything else than an alliance with a foreign invasion. The
others determined to remain inactive for the time, and wait the events
of the summer.
As the spring opened and it became certain to the revolutionists that
New York was the object at which the allied attack was to be first
aimed, they summoned more of their forces from the interior, and left
the patriots greater opportunity to move with freedom. The two little
armies of northern New England and of western New York united near Lake
George and slowly moved down the western bank of the Hudson to Newburg,
where they could watch events and take such part as might seem best at
the time. They numbered altogether about fifty thousand men.
As soon as the spring weather allowed, the revolutionists renewed
their efforts to put the metropolis in a condition of defence. The
approaches to the harbor were entirely closed by the sinking of
additional barges and scows laden with stones. Torpedoes were thickly
planted outside these obstructions, so as to make any attempt to
remove them as dangerous as possible. Relying upon the inability of
the attacking squadron to pass these obstacles and enter the harbor,
the revolutionists imitated the tactics of Admiral Seymour at Boston,
and removed most of the guns from the forts below the city to the
earthworks and intrenchments they had thrown up to the northward and
eastward of it.
The allies lay encamped along the Connecticut shore of the Sound,
mostly between Bridgeport and Greenwich. From New Rochelle to Yonkers
the revolutionists erected a chain of strong works, stretching entirely
across the peninsula whose point is occupied by New York city. Three
separate lines of intrenchments were constructed, each one of which was
capable of being defended after everything in front of it was in the
possession of the enemy. Detached forts and redoubts were thrown up on
every elevation or commanding point.
On the Brooklyn side the defences were less elaborate, but still
strong. It was evident that the possession of Brooklyn by the allies
would render New York untenable; but the revolutionists felt confident
that they could transport troops faster from the forts above New York
to the Brooklyn side than the allies could be moved across the Sound
to attack from Long Island. They had the inner and shorter circle
on which to move. Besides, a defeat of the allies, if they should
be defeated, on the island would be vastly more disastrous to them
than a repulse from the works on the mainland. It was not likely that
General von Blücken would take such an unnecessary risk. In fact, the
revolutionists were right. He intended from the outset to make his
attack on New York from the northward.
During the winter the British troops in Boston pushed their way out
into the interior, especially developing their strength towards the
southwest, in the direction of the camp of the allies. Early in March
they took possession of Providence,--still a fair and beautiful city,
despite the havoc and ruin which the rule of the lawless hordes of the
revolution had wrought in it. The revolutionists who were driven out of
the city joined those at Worcester and Springfield, and by the middle
of March regained the main force in New York by way of Albany and the
eastern shore of the Hudson. This left the whole of lower New England
practically in the undisputed possession of the allies. They speedily
repaired the railway lines leading from Boston towards New York, and
thus secured ready communication between the main army and several
other important ports and depots of supplies besides New London, at
which most of the army’s material had hitherto been landed.
XV.
THE ALLIES ATTACK NEW YORK.
Early in May the outposts of the opposing forces were face to face,
and occasional skirmishes had already taken place. The two armies were
nearly evenly matched in point of numbers. The allies counted up five
hundred and twenty-two thousand men on shore, besides a naval force
of about thirty thousand, in one hundred and twenty-two ships of war
belonging to one grade or another. Only thirty-five of these vessels
were iron-clad, but all carried effective armaments. In addition, the
Sound was filled with an innumerable fleet of transports, tugs, and
similar craft, acting as tenders on the larger ships.
With the force which had been withdrawn from New England, the
revolutionists mustered in New York and Brooklyn about five hundred and
fifty thousand men. Whatever reinforcements they received after the
first of May were cantoned in Jersey City and Hoboken, to watch the
movements of the loyalists up the river at Newburg. It was possible
that they might move down the west shore and cut off communication with
the South and West, as the allies had already cut off communication to
the North and East; and this was to be prevented at all hazards.
On the third of May, the allies carried by assault and at the point of
the bayonet a detached earthwork, known as Fort Schwab, which commanded
the village of New Rochelle. It was an isolated work, and most of the
garrison escaped behind the cover of their lines to the rear. But
they did not have time to spike their guns; and during the entire
night these pieces continued a harassing fire upon them. The morning
of the fourth, attack was resumed along the whole line. All that day
the contest raged with inconceivable fury. Again and again were the
allies repulsed; again and again were they pushed forward. Their
sledge-hammer blows were repeated first at one point, then at another,
with persistent and terrible iteration. Twice, after actually capturing
the outer line of defences, they were driven back into the open field.
They returned to the charge the third time, and nightfall found them
in possession of an entire division of this line. The revolutionists,
though not trained soldiers, saw that they would be unable to hold the
remaining portions, and under cover of the night withdrew to the next
line of defence. Though they had suffered a technical defeat, they
felt in no way disheartened over the result of the day. They had held
the allies in check and had inflicted losses which they knew from the
number of their own dead must have been terrible. They still retained
possession of a double line of intrenchments stronger than the one
which had been taken. They anticipated a delay of some days, if not
weeks, before another attempt was made.
That very night, while the revolutionists were sleeping, General von
Blücken despatched a force of fifty thousand men across the Sound to
Long Island. They landed in silence, and without discovery approached
the revolutionary lines so closely that at daybreak they were able
to surprise a small earthwork and carry it by mere rush of numbers,
without the firing of a single shot. But the surprise was short-lived.
The revolutionists sprang to their arms and fought bravely as soon as
the allied advance reached their next defence. The alarm was sounded,
and assistance from other parts of the Brooklyn lines was despatched
to the support of the overmastered socialists. Reinforcements were
hurried across the river from New York. The fight surged back and
forth, and the roar of conflict which reached New York was as loud and
as menacing as that of the preceding day’s battle near New Rochelle had
been.
The attack on that side was wholly suspended during this action. The
scouts and outposts of the revolutionists reported that transports
were to be seen moving in great numbers across the Sound to the Long
Island shore, loaded with troops and returning empty. The revolutionary
generals hastily decided that Von Blücken must have changed his
original intention, owing to the resistance he had met with above the
city, and that he was moving on what they felt to be their weakest
point, Brooklyn. They must defend that city at all hazards. Over two
hundred thousand men were withdrawn from the works to the northward of
New York and hurried across to the aid of the Brooklyn garrison.
Not till it was too late did the revolutionists discover that they had
been made the victims of a mere feint,--one of the simplest tricks
of war, though in this case shrewdly managed. It was true that the
transports which were kept plying across the narrow waters of the Sound
did, for an hour after daybreak, carry considerable reinforcements to
the allied forces which were engaged in the attack on the Brooklyn
intrenchments; but this was continued only until General von Blücken
felt sure that he had enough men on Long Island completely to engross
the enemy’s attention. During all the rest of the morning the
transports, which seemed to be full of men on their southward passage
and empty on their return, were really bringing back to the mainland
more troops than they carried over. Each one, on its southward trip,
was manned on the side towards the revolutionists’ lines with dummy
figures, among whom a few men moved about to give them the appearance
of life. On their return these figures were hidden below the bulwarks,
and the wounded, after whom the transports were really sent, were taken
below decks where they could not be seen. Several complete regiments,
whose services were found to be unnecessary for the success of the
feint, were brought back hidden in the same way, and rejoined their
divisions before the northern forts.
About the middle of the afternoon the allies drew back from Brooklyn
towards Great Neck, and the revolutionists recovered all the ground
which had been wrested from them in the first surprise. But their
assailants showed no signs of leaving the island, and were kept
constantly marching and countermarching so as to produce the conviction
that they were in greater numbers than was the fact. This belief,
corroborated by the reports of the outposts north of the city as to
the immense number of men who had been transported across the Sound,
was still further strengthened in the minds of the revolutionists by a
fierce attack which a small brigade made on them from the side towards
Coney Island during the night. A regiment of German hussars actually
dashed upon a camp of over ten thousand men on the extreme southern
wing, sabred their way through it, and carried off several prisoners.
The boldness of the affair convinced the revolutionists that a strong
force had arrived on that side of them, ready to attack them there next
morning while the army resting at Great Neck renewed the fight from the
northward. The officers at the New York defences reported that only an
occasional gun had been fired from the works of the allies there during
the day, and that a sham attack had been made on a bastion about the
centre of the line, but that very few men were to be seen.
All but about one hundred and fifty thousand of the revolutionary
forces were sent to the Brooklyn side; and it was determined to take
advantage of the earliest dawn to turn the tables on the foreigners by
surprising them, without giving them the opportunity to repeat their
tactics of the day before.
A greater surprise than anything they meditated awaited the
revolutionists. General von Blücken had been busily, though secretly,
at work all that day and night gathering forces at a point just above
Mount Vernon and near the centre of the opposing line. Before midnight
he had massed there more men than were behind the whole extent of
the works in front of him. A show of activity and watchfulness was
kept up in the allied camp on Long Island; but before daybreak all
the troops sent there to join in the feint had been withdrawn again,
except a couple of flying horse-batteries and a single squadron of
cavalry, which were ordered to retire whenever attacked and keep out
of range,--as they could easily do, owing to the almost total lack of
cavalry among the revolutionists with which to pursue them. When the
besieged “surprised” the besiegers’ camp, at daybreak the next morning,
they found only empty tents and smouldering watch-fires which had been
burning untended for several hours.
They were allowed scant time to reflect upon the probable meaning of
this trick. Before they had really discovered what had happened, from
the allied parallels beyond New Rochelle a single gun boomed forth
in the clear morning air. It was Von Blücken’s signal for a general
attack. A thousand cannon mouths answered its summons, and told the
revolutionists on Long Island that deadly work was beginning for their
friends in the weakened intrenchments above the city. They strove with
desperate speed to return in time to be of assistance; but they were
not able.
This attack was no feint. In overwhelming numbers the allies poured
over the earthworks which confronted them. Redoubt after redoubt,
breastwork after breastwork, fort after fort was carried at the point
of the bayonet. The resistance made was desperate, and the retreat
sullen and slow. But the attenuated line of defenders at no moment
was able to stop or even delay the advance of the solid masses of men
which were hurled against it, first at one point, then at another. The
carnage was frightful. Whole regiments on both sides were literally
swept out of existence. But not for an instant did the attacking
columns waver. On and on they pressed: now charging with a rush like an
avalanche upon some fortification in which a more than usually stubborn
resistance was being offered them; now moving in compact and splendid
order along the routes which, long before he had ordered the assault,
had been marked down for them to follow by the brilliant strategist
commanding them.
It was not yet noon when Von Blücken, coming up from the rear, found
the enemy in flight from a redoubt near the centre of their last line
of defence, and the flag of his own Fatherland waving above it. Riding
to the fort, he ordered its guns to be instantly turned in either
direction upon the works which still held out. The revolutionist forces
from Brooklyn, hurrying pell-mell through the city, on their arrival at
the front found the allies in full possession of a half-dozen portions
of the last line of works, with guns already mounted in them which
commanded the city itself. Nowhere was a tenable position left in their
hands. Had the allies been desirous of doing so, they could at once
have entered the city. There was no power which could prevent them from
taking possession in the morning. It was seen that the city must be
evacuated.
All night the ferry-boats, which offered the only means of escape to
westward and southward, were kept hurrying back and forth between
the city and the New Jersey shore, loaded with the retreat. Slowly
the rear-guard of the revolutionists drew backward down the city as
the troops below crossed the river. In almost every block from which
they retreated they left “infernal machines” of more or less elaborate
construction, calculated to explode after a set time and destroy
everything about them, or to burst into flames after the same interval
and fire the buildings in which they were placed. Some fires were set
directly by impatient hands, and it was not long after midnight that
the allied sentries reported the city in flames.
General Wood, who had charge of the army during the night, was
notified, and rode forward to an eminence from which he could see the
city, by this time casting a brilliant light upon its own destruction.
He saw that the fire was confined, thus far, to the upper portion,
while the lower streets were still dark, and evidently held by the
revolutionists. He surmised at once that they were retreating to Jersey
City. Reports from the river bank soon verified this belief.
But what were they going to do with the city? Were they simply burning
the upper portion, so as to oppose a real wall of fire to the allied
advance, till they could safely complete their retreat? Or were they
determined to destroy the entire city rather than have it fall into
the allies’ possession? If any attempt should be made to save it from
destruction by sending soldiers to extinguish the flames already
raging, was it not likely that they would run great risk of being
destroyed by scores and hundreds in the explosion of the “infernal
machines,” which were the favorite weapons of the revolutionists, and
which they had no doubt scattered thickly along the route the troops
would have to take?
General Wood sat on his horse for some moments, watching the flames.
Turning at last to a staff officer beside him, he remarked: “They are
going to destroy behind them all of the place that will burn. I doubt
if our men will find much shelter left them.”
“The fire might possibly be checked if we should go at it now,”
responded the officer.
General Wood replied with abrupt decision: “That has been an Irish
city for forty years. It has been worse than Dublin. It has been more
dangerous to England than all Ireland itself, because it has been
beyond our reach. For the last dozen or twenty years it has been the
rottenest centre of socialism in the whole world. I would not risk the
life of a single honest and decent soldier to save the whole Sodom from
utter destruction!”
All night the sentries on picket duty along the allied lines watched
the flames extending and the light growing in intensity. Occasional
explosions from the midst of burning areas showed that General Wood had
been correct in his suspicion that deadly mines lay in wait for any who
might try to extinguish the conflagration. At daybreak he reported the
condition of affairs to General von Blücken. The commander approved
his action, but ordered several of the smaller vessels to reconnoitre
immediately the Hell-Gate passage of the East River and report if that
route was practicable for transports or war-ships.
Admiral Seymour had anticipated the need of this knowledge the moment
the burning and abandonment of the city was reported to him, and at
the earliest dawn three small vessels--two of them tugs and one a
light-armored cruiser--had pushed through the Gate and descended safely
as far as Blackwell’s Island. Their report was brought to General von
Blücken by Admiral Seymour in person, shortly after seven o’clock in
the morning. A force of seventy-five thousand men was instantly ordered
to embark and to proceed down the river to the Battery. If that was
deserted, they were to push across the Hudson and attempt a landing on
the New Jersey shore. Before the transports started, about twenty-five
of the lighter-armored and swifter of the fighting vessels in the fleet
steamed in advance down the narrow East River to clear the way and draw
the fire of any of the enemy who might still linger in their retreat.
At the same time a slow and cautious advance was made by the army from
the North directly upon the burning city.
It was soon found that the entire upper half of the town was
in hopeless ruins. But as morning approached, the retreat had
become more of a flight, and less time had been left the hurrying
revolutionists to devote to destruction. All through the lower half
of the city buildings were found on fire, but there had been no
such universal incendiarism as had caused the obliteration of every
structure above Central Park. No apparatus for putting out fires had
been left in working order in the city; but by the demolition of
surrounding buildings the allies succeeded in confining these detached
conflagrations to narrow limits, within which they eventually burned
themselves out.
The revolutionists made no stop at Jersey City on their retreat. They
knew that in a very short time it would be under the guns of the allied
fleet. They had been compelled to abandon all their artillery except
a few batteries of field-pieces, and could make no reply that would
be felt within the iron sides of the armored vessels. Picking up the
detachments which had been left along the west shore to watch the
loyalists at Newburg, they pushed on towards Philadelphia.
Though driven out of New York, they were by no means conquered. They
felt that they had been beaten by strategy and trick. In open fight
they still had confidence in their ability to hold the invaders in
check, if not signally to defeat them. The moment the news reached
Washington that New York had fallen, O’Halloran, Wagner, and Liest
despatched orders to every socialist and Irish organization in the
North and West, calling for their last available men. The three
themselves hurried northward to meet the retiring army, reaching
Philadelphia at the same time that its advance-guard arrived. Most
of the troops had been compelled to march on foot across New Jersey,
owing to the failure of railroad transport; and it was not till the
fourteenth of May that the last brigades arrived.
In this emergency, and by consent of the other two members of the
“Directory,” O’Halloran, who showed by far the most endurance and
courage of all, was given supreme military command. He found that he
was still in control of a formidable army. It had lost by death and
desertions about a hundred and fifty thousand men since the allies
landed. But the detachments which had been collected from the cities on
the shore of the Hudson opposite New York, the detail which had been
met at Philadelphia, the forces which had been brought from Washington
and Baltimore, and the reinforcements which had already arrived
from points to the westward, had more than made good these losses.
O’Halloran found that he could oppose to the invaders as numerous an
army as had met them before New York, while he assumed that they would
be unable to replace the men whom they had lost.
In a measure, this was true; yet General von Blücken had repaired his
losses much more fully than O’Halloran suspected. During the attack
on New York of the fourth of May he had sent to Boston for twenty
thousand men from the British garrison there. The day that New York
fell, eighteen thousand more were called to his force, leaving only
about five thousand to hold Boston, and as many more along the line of
communication southward. But the retreat of the revolutionists had made
this force ample. Meanwhile several troop-ships had arrived, bringing
reinforcements from Europe.
Two days after he had taken possession of New York, Brooklyn, and
the New Jersey cities, General von Blücken found his strength so far
recruited that he was able to push forward in pursuit of the retiring
foe. At the same time a portion of the fleet, with a considerable force
of marines, was sent to make a demonstration against Washington, and if
the city was found undefended, to seize it. Another smaller detachment
was ordered up the Chesapeake to try Baltimore.
XVI.
THE FINAL STRUGGLE.
The contending forces were too large to admit of rapid movement on
either side; but the better discipline and greater attention to detail
on the part of the allies gave them an advantage in the race, and they
slowly but surely gained on the revolutionists. The latter were falling
back, with the evident intention of resting behind the defences of
Washington, when the advancing troops of the allies began to press upon
their rear. By a strange fatality, this encounter took place near the
town of Gettysburg; and it was on that historic field, which saw the
most decisive struggle of the civil war, that the last battle of 1888
was also fought.
It was the 11th of June when the two armies found themselves once
more face to face. For the whole of the preceding day and evening
impassioned socialistic and Irish agitators had been passing around
the revolutionary camp, inciting their hearers to wilder and fiercer
fanaticism. So successful had they been that even the camp followers
who had fled in panic out of New York to escape the allied guns, became
clamorous for an opportunity to meet their victors once more in open
fight.
Early the following morning (June 12, 1888) the battle opened. For two
days the desperate fight raged around the little town; and the two
“Round Tops,” whose summits were the objects of constant attack by one
party or the other, once more shed rivulets of blood down their steep
and rocky sides. The allies were by far the better armed and the better
disciplined; but the revolutionists fought literally “to the death.”
They introduced a new and terrible element into civilized warfare by
refusing to give quarter to their prisoners. The allied soldiers soon
learned of this barbarism, and, despite the attempts of their officers
to restrain them, retaliated in kind. Their rage became as furious as
the fanaticism of their opponents.
The close of the second day found the hordes of the revolution in panic
and flight. They were more than defeated, they were annihilated. Their
disorganization was as rapid and complete as had been their first
successes, a year before. Not a brigade was left to guard a retreat.
The whole array of survivors dissolved into mere bands and scattered
over the country.
Many thousand prisoners were taken, among them a few who had become
known as leaders in the different revolutionary organizations. Kopf
was caught hiding in a farm-yard, near Harrisburg, several days after
the battle; he was sent to Germany for trial. Herr Liest had been
killed during the first day’s battle. Wagner escaped, and has never
since been heard of. It is thought he perished of starvation, or was
killed during one of the raids which were frequently made by small
bands of outlaws on scouting parties of the allies during the summer
and fall. O’Halloran was captured during the pursuit after the battle.
He had thrown himself into a ditch, and tried to conceal himself by
hiding in a pool of mud and water, with his head covered by the weeds
which grew from the sides of the filthy drain. He was dragged out and
almost immediately recognized by an English soldier who had once met
him in Ireland. He was court-martialled on the spot, charged with
responsibility for the order to his followers to give no quarter to
their prisoners, and shot at sunrise the following morning. A few other
prisoners, who were proved guilty of murdering wounded and helpless
men, were similarly tried and executed. Several thousand, who had been
known in Europe as professional plotters and agitators, were sent back
to their respective Governments in irons for trial on account of old
offences.
Zealous effort was made by the allies to discover and arrest the
mysterious leader whose edicts, emanating from the “Council of Seven,”
had been so powerful in the early days of the revolution. Nothing was
ever found to furnish even a clew to his identity. There are those,
even now, who believe that he is still living, hidden in obscurity
and seclusion, and ready to seize the first opportunity which chance
may afford him to resume his warfare on organized society. But this
is not likely. Whether he still lives, or whether he perished in the
bloody closing of the revolution, the mystery in which he purposely
enshrouded himself at the beginning of the struggle still hangs over
him, and there is no real ground for the expectation that it will be
ever lifted.
The revolution was at an end. For two months there was skirmishing
and occasionally a fierce contest that might almost be called a
battle between detachments of the allies and disintegrating bands of
socialists or dynamiters who had taken refuge in various fastnesses of
the land. It was six months before the last of the privateers which
they had fitted out to ravage commerce was captured, and the seas
were once more pronounced safe to trading vessels. But so far as any
organization or real strength was involved, the struggle at Gettysburg
had been conclusive. One by one the cities and forts of the whole country
were garrisoned by the allies. The land was put under martial law.
XVII.
FOREIGN OCCUPATION.
Then came the question to the conquerors, What shall we do with the
fruits of our victory? The problem was debated at length and anxiously
in Paris and London and Berlin. At first it was proposed to imprison
all the socialists, anarchists, nihilists, and dynamiters remaining in
the country; but it was speedily found that this was impracticable. To
say nothing of the others, the Irish who had taken active part in the
revolution or contributed to its support, and who sympathized with the
dynamite warfare on civilization, were not less than eight millions.
All the jails and prisons in the world would not have confined them.
Their organizations were proscribed and their meetings prohibited;
but it was clear from a thousand indications that their spirit of
hatred and cruelty remained unchanged, and that they waited only the
opportunity to renew their crimes. The same was true in even greater
degree of the socialists and anarchists. They regarded themselves as
the friends and martyrs of liberty. The allies were to them simply
minions of tyranny who had combined to crush out human freedom. It
was believed that the patriots of the country, loyal to the old
republican idea, still outnumbered the anarchists, and would outvote
them at the polls. But they were peaceable men, devoted to trade and
industry, and had already been proved powerless to enforce with arms
the decrees their majorities might render at the ballot-boxes. The
summer and autumn passed away, and the problem remained unsolved. It
was decided at last to hold another pan-European conference, this time
at Washington, in which all the Powers which had taken part in the
conference of January at Berlin should meet and reach some definite
decision regarding the future.
This foreign congress met on the first Monday of December,--the very
day on which, in happier times, the Congress of the United States
had been accustomed to convene. It met in the Senate Chamber of
the Capitol, over which the Stars and Stripes floated no longer.
The national flag was replaced by the flags of the various Powers
represented in the conference, that of each being displayed one day at
a time in regular order.
England and France were disposed to restore the republic to the people,
and trust to them to defend themselves against domestic convulsions;
but they stood alone in this. They were unable to reply to the
objections raised by the other Powers, that this would inevitably
result in another revolution, and the necessity upon Europe, as the
guardian of civilization, once more to conquer the country. Was it
expedient to accept the risk of such another war? Moreover, who was
to bear the expense of the struggle just completed? For herself,
Germany protested that she was unwilling to forego her right to demand
indemnity from the United States. England also took this view. There
was no possibility that such an indemnity--amounting to fully three
thousand millions of dollars--could be obtained if the autonomy of
the nation were restored. The following recommendations were finally
drafted by the conference:--
That the signatory Powers should continue in occupation of the United
States at least until another conference should agree as to the safety
of establishing some sort of local government; that the supreme
authority should be vested in a board of European administrators, to
be appointed, one by each Power, and to choose a president from their
own number; that this board should levy taxes and customs, from which
they should repay to Germany, England, and France such sums as those
Governments had respectively expended in the war; that the cost of
maintaining the army of occupation should also be defrayed from the
local taxes; and that a sufficient direct tax should be imposed to
result, within three years, in the payment of three hundred and fifty
millions of dollars to each of the three Governments at London, Berlin,
and Paris, to be applied towards pensions required for the sufferers by
the war.
The recommendations of the conference were accepted and adopted by the
Governments concerned. Their armies still garrison the land; their
agents sit in the Capitol at Washington. Cities and towns are allowed
to elect local councils, but they administer only such local affairs
as do not involve the power of taxation or of expending money. The
purse-strings are held in the hands of the European administrators
and their subordinates. Not even a road tax can be levied except on
their warrants; not even a school-district meeting held without their
permission and the presence of their guards to preserve order and
repress possible sedition.
Nevertheless there are many who find the subject position of the
country quite as endurable as its condition before the revolution. To
be sure, taxation is heavy, but its burdens fall equitably upon all.
Business men find themselves much better protected in their pecuniary
dealings than ever before. Bank cashiers who steal funds committed to
their care are punished with such severity that the crime has almost
ceased to be known. Not a single defalcation has been reported during
the two years of 1894 and 1895.
The courts are presided over by foreign judges, it is true, and they
are not generally favorites with the lawyers. But the people are
not wholly dissatisfied. A New York attorney who was suspected in
the fall of 1893 of trying to clear a murderer by the introduction
of false testimony, was actually tried, convicted, disbarred, fined
to the last cent of his ill-gotten wealth, and sentenced to prison
for ten years. Those who depend upon the courts for justice are not
entirely displeased by such things. The newspapers are held in strict
accountability. There is no longer such an issue as “politics” for
them to discuss and play the demagogue over. They are confined to the
publication of news and the discussion of such topics as cannot be
twisted into a seditious turn. Under the influence of the prevailing
tendency toward honesty and fairness, they are actually coming to aim
at the truth in their news.
In brief, throughout the whole land the moral atmosphere is purer
and healthier than it ever was before. Socialists and anarchists and
dynamiters still lurk beneath the surface, but they have little
opportunity for organization, and a single overt act on their part is
the signal for an instant exercise of such severity as men use towards
a nest of poisonous reptiles which show a tendency to attack innocent
passers-by.
There is no longer private liberty within the land, but there is public
order. Individual rights are respected, protected, and enforced; the
law is justly administered; crime is punished as surely and as severely
when committed by men of rank and station as when committed by less
intelligent, and therefore less responsible, men. There are signs that
the popular mind is beginning to feel aspirations after honesty and
fairness for their own sakes, and to regard successful dishonesty and
corruption with less respect than were common during the existence
of the Republic. If these signs continue and increase, there is the
possibility that the Great Republic of the past may at some future
time arise once more from the ashes in which its memory now sleeps, and
on a purer, nobler, more enduring foundation than that on which the men
of 1776–1888 builded. But it will hardly come in our time. The mills of
the gods grind slowly when their task is to grind into perfect flour
the grist of a corrupt and ignorant humanity.
APPENDIX.
I.
THE SOCIALISTIC SPIRIT IN 1885.
“Working-men! Throw aside your tools; take to guns; destroy your
oppressors; tear down the barriers which close the way to happiness,
to true manhood and freedom; secure for yourselves such conditions
as shall enable every one who is willing to work to enjoy to the
utmost the fruits of his labor! And you tramps, who, hungry, cold,
and homeless, wander through the country, a moving picture of our
splendid civilization, while a lazy, paltry crowd in their well-warmed
palaces treat themselves to the products of your labor,--you may yet
hope soon to have a reckoning, and take what belongs to you. You,
too, will yet be able to enjoy life if you will resolve to use the
power which Nature has given you, and which makes it possible for you
to produce riches. Band together, then, and arm yourselves! To the
fight, working-men! up, proletariat!... Among the friends of freedom,
socialists, and other revolutionists, the fixed idea is still met with,
that the good must in the nature of things certainly prevail sooner or
later. This, too, is a remnant of religious superstition. For the idea
can only be maintained on the assumption of a certain conformity to a
purpose in the course of history; and this in turn pre-supposes the
existence of a higher conscious being. That this idea must enfeeble
and narcotize the energy is evident. It is the most dangerous opiate
that there is for revolutionists. Religion, authority, and State are
all of a piece. To the devil with theory! The savior of the present
world must be one who will free us from the savior of the old world....
His common name is ‘Reason.’ ... His proper name is ‘Atheism,’ or
‘Disbelief.’”--_The Anzeiger, New Haven, Conn., February, 1885._
II.
A REVOLUTION NEAR AT HAND.--“IT MUST
COME.”
“The anarchist leaders met yesterday in secret session in a saloon on
Pennsylvania Avenue. There were delegates present from nearly all the
manufacturing towns in this section of the country. The meeting was
called by J. W. Gorsuch and Samuel Fielden, who were sent here by the
anarchists from Chicago to present a plan whereby the work of the cause
could be carried on among the working-men unknown to the employers.
“Fielden before he came here spoke at all the manufacturing towns. He
found, he said, that many laborers were socialists at heart, but were
afraid to attend the meetings. They came to the conclusion, therefore,
that the work must be carried on secretly until the time when the final
blow is to be struck. He argued that it was time to revolt. There was
no use denying the condition of the working-men, as the producers had
grown steadily worse, while the non-producers increased their wealth
to enormous degrees. This system was criminal to workmen, who must
strike for their freedom.
“Gorsuch said Americans were not free men now, and that the only way
they could demonstrate their right to the title was by destroying the
system which perpetuates the galling contrast of princely wealth and
degrading poverty. Fielden was asked, ‘Do you believe in dynamite as a
means of warfare?’
“‘We will not hesitate to use anything when the time arrives. A
revolution is near at hand. It must come. We want to abolish the
present system of government. Some one must suffer in every reform, and
lives must be sacrificed. I am in favor of the quickest means for the
accomplishment of our purpose.’”--_Despatch from Pittsburg, Pa., to the
New York World, Feb. 22, 1885._
III.
A FEMALE SOCIALIST’S ADVICE.
“Mrs. Parsons, who is a colored woman, made an unusually fiery speech.
She began by berating her hearers as cowards, and unworthy of the name
of manhood, because they allowed the aggressions of capital to continue
and their daughters to barter their virtue for bread. If they were men,
as they claimed to be, she said, they would blow up every house on the
adjoining avenues before they would submit to it. They would demolish
the police-stations, court-house, and jails, and fling dynamite in the
faces of the army and navy. If they were afraid to do this, however,
they need not look for a captain, for she would fill her apron with
dynamite and lead them along the avenues of the city where the rich
reside, destroying as they went.
“Her husband advised his hearers to study chemistry and take lessons
from those expert in the manufacture of deadly explosives.”--_Extract
from a newspaper report of a meeting of “the dynamite section” of the
Chicago socialists, Feb. 22, 1885._
IV.
ATHEISM, COMMUNISM, AND ANARCHY.
The “New England Anzeiger” of March 14, 1885, appeared with a first
page framed in gory red, and containing lurid accounts of the
revolutions of March 14, 1848, in Vienna; of March 18, 1848, in Berlin;
of March 18, 1871, in Paris; and of the assassination of the Czar of
Russia, March 13, 1881. The following extract shows the tone of the
article:--
“The dead of the 14th of March were buried, and with them the
revolution; for everything that then happened in Berlin--yes, in all
Germany--proved the political immaturity of the people; and the friend
of humanity looks on in sadness to think how much good might have been
accomplished in the year 1848 if the people had known what they know
to-day,--to-day, when all the countries of Europe have behind them the
powerful and deep-seated labor movement of more than twenty years, and
when the principles of atheism, communism, and anarchy are daily and
hourly, in the hut and in the palace (in the former with enthusiasm, in
the latter with anxiety), considered and pondered over.”
V.
THE FORCES ARRAYED AGAINST CIVILIZATION.
“There are worse things than dynamite. The godless and law-defying
forces back of it constitute the real danger. These forces are arrayed
against civilization. All over the world the masses are in a state
of agitation. New ideas and false theories are being presented and
expounded by fanatics, charlatans, and demagogues. In an age of
free speech and free print new doctrines spread rapidly. The poor,
unsuccessful, dissatisfied, and lawless elements of society are boiling
over with the maddening thought that somebody is doing them a great
wrong. The restlessness of these people has been intensified by the
teachings of earnest and well-meaning but misguided men. Henry George’s
opinions have spread like wildfire, and taught millions to believe that
private property in land is against the laws of nature and of God.
Hyndman, in England, and other writers are spreading the notion that
capital is the enemy of labor, eating up all the profits and keeping
the working-man on starvation-wages. Others follow Prudhon, and declare
that ‘all property is robbery.’ Others argue that religion, morality,
government are all tricks of the oppressor, designed to keep the
people down and out of their rights.”--_Editorial in The Atlanta, Ga.,
Constitution, March, 1885._
VI.
THE PROSPECTS OF AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN
DYNAMITERS AND COMMUNISTS.
“The communists were in high feather last night at the Germania
Assembly Rooms. They met to commemorate all operations of rebellious
societies against governments in general and the Paris revolution of
1871 in particular.... When the speaker referred to the barricades, and
prophesied an early recognition of the ‘establishment of human liberty’
and the destruction of all crowned heads by an agent more powerful than
the dreaded guillotine, the sons of Clavis sent up a roar of applause
and bravos, intermingled with an occasional ‘hear, hear!’ from a dozen
nitro-dynamiteurs who came to explore the prospects of an alliance,
offensive and defensive, with their fiery Continental brothers on behalf
of the ‘rights of man.’”--_New York Tribune report, March 23, 1885._
VII.
TWO CONTEMPORARY CRITICISMS.
“The existence of passion, favoritism, nepotism, and subjection to
the behests of party, instead of love of country, thoughtfulness, and
systematic business principles in the administration of government,
with too much esotericism in its conduct, gives posts of honor to
servants that impede, and retains officials that resist reform and
accuracy in the civil service of the country. They forget that they are
chosen to be about their country’s business, in which every citizen
has an interest. Thus the want of business capacity and fidelity to
the people’s trust furnishes many causes for the law’s delay, and some
for its death.”--_Chief-Justice Thomas F. Hargis in the North American
Review for April, 1885._
“The predominant vices of America, especially as represented by
its great cities, are its irreverence, its recklessness, its
impatience,--in one word, its materialism. A nation in which the
artistic sense is almost dead; which is practically without a
literature; which is impatient of all sanctions and indifferent to
all religions; which is corrupt from the highest pinnacle of its
public life down to the lowest depth of its primalism; which is at
once thin-skinned under criticism and aggressive to criticise; which
worships material forces in every shape and form; which despises
conventional conditions, yet is slavish to ignoble fashions; which,
too hasty to think for itself, takes recklessly at second-hand any old
or new clothes philosophy that may be imported from Europe, yet, while
wearing the raiment openly, mocks and ridicules the civilization that
wove the fabric,” etc.--_Robert Buchanan in the same number of the same
Review._
VIII.
THE COURTS.--ONE JOURNALISTIC WARNING
OUT OF MANY.
“One of the main reliances of the criminal element of our city for
escaping from the clutches of the law is the subornation of perjury.
A class of professional false swearers has grown up, and their aid
is invoked without hesitation in the criminal courts. This startling
and shameful fact was fully revealed to the public on the Ford trial.
Society can find no protection under the ægis of the courts until this
iniquity shall have been uprooted and cast out. The ermine sits under
a upas-tree as long as men and women in droves dare commit the crime
of perjury. No jury can justly decide any case if a terrible blow
be not first struck at false testimony. And there are back of these
perjurers the suborners. The master should be reached as well as the
hireling.”--_Editorial in the New Orleans Picayune, March 2, 1885._
IX.
THE UNPROTECTED ATLANTIC COAST.
Early in February, 1885, the New York Produce Exchange presented a
Memorial to the Congress of the United States, setting forth, among
other things, that the city of New York and the adjacent cities of
Brooklyn and Jersey City “represent an interest in house ownership and
real estate amounting to over $3,000,000,000; that all this realty is
entirely unprotected from an attack by hostile fleets, which could
bombard the city and the neighboring populated districts without even
entering the Narrows.
“It is known abroad as well as at home,” the memorialists say, “that
the shores of this country are entirely unprotected; and it would be
only an act of reasonable precaution that New York, the chief city
of the nation, should be defended by such permanent forts, floating
batteries, gunboats, and torpedo service as will give us a guaranty
against sudden invasion until the country shall have time to build an
adequate fleet for defensive purposes.”
X.
A SINGLE ILLUSTRATION OF THE IRISH-AMERICAN
SPIRIT.
The hundred and seventh anniversary of Robert Emmet’s birth was
celebrated in Faneuil Hall by the Irish citizens of Boston in February,
1885. The chief address of the evening was delivered by the Rev. P. A.
McKenna. In the course of it he said, as reported by a Boston daily
paper:--
“It seems almost advisable that since the Prince of Wales goes to
Ireland as an invader, he should be treated as such. There is one
principle which justifies the taking of human life, and that is the
principle of self-defence of the person or the nation. It would not be
becoming to advocate extreme measures; but let Irishmen contemptuously
ignore the presence of the Prince of Wales.” [Applause.]
Mrs. Marguerite Moore was introduced as a woman recently from Ireland
who had suffered incarceration for the cause. She spoke of love for
Ireland, of hate for England, and pictured the misery of her native
land in the past and in the present. “The Irishmen of America demand
vengeance. The opportunity has come in England’s present difficulty,
and advantage will be taken of that fact. The sappers and miners, who
blow the people up, are as necessary to the Irish army as are dashing
cavalry or steady infantry. [Applause.] Every man to his like in this
respect,” said she. [And voices cried out “Dynamite!”]
Thomas Riley spoke on the topic of “Dynamite.” He did not think it
necessary to say that they preferred to use that mode of warfare, but
they would insist that they had no tears to shed at the consequences.
“Is there anything wrong in the use of dynamite under certain
conditions?” [“No, no!” cried out a dozen voices.] Dynamite, the
speaker declared, had done no more injury than had other methods used
by England. O’Donovan Rossa was mentioned, and a continued round of
applause, cheers and “tigers,” followed. The speaker urged unity among
Irishmen. “Ireland is ripe,” said he, “and the hour is approaching. If
England but raises her hand against any nation, even a third or fourth
class nation, Ireland will stab her in the back and stab her to the
heart; and if she needs the knife, we’ll send it to her.”
The meeting closed with three cheers for O’Donovan Rossa; but before
so doing, passed, as suggested by the last speaker, resolutions as
follows:--
“Whereas the present unsettled condition of Europe, especially our old
enemy England, indicates that an uprising of the oppressed people will
in the very near future occur;
“And whereas the Irish and those of Irish-American descent have
been for a long period of years proclaiming to the world Ireland’s
sufferings and wrongs and England’s unlawful and brutal usurpations;
“And whereas, as in the past the principal cause of our weakness and
failures to effect the removal of said usurpation was disunion among
ourselves, through which unhappily the common enemy was armed and we
disarmed;
“And whereas, if we expect to effect the freedom of Ireland it must
be accomplished as united brothers tolerant of each other, working
harmoniously in the same sacred cause, to secure the same holy object;
“Therefore be it resolved that we, Irish-American citizens of Boston
and vicinity, in Faneuil Hall assembled, send forth from this historic
cradle of liberty an earnest appeal to all aspirants and workers for
Ireland’s disenthralment to forget all past differences and unite for
the opportune crisis, fast approaching, to strike the successful blow
for Ireland.”
XI.
THE ARMY OF THE DISCONTENTED.
“That a deep-rooted feeling of discontent pervades the masses, none
can deny; that there is a just cause for it, must be admitted. The old
cry, ‘These agitators are stirring up a feeling of dissatisfaction
among working-men, and they should be suppressed,’ will not avail
now. Every thinking person knows that the agitator did not throw two
millions of men out of employment.... That the army of the discontented
is gathering fresh recruits day by day is true; and if this army
should become so large that, driven to desperation, it should one day
arise in its wrath and grapple with its real and fancied enemy, the
responsibility for that act must fall upon the heads of those who could
have averted the blow, but who turned a deaf ear to the supplication
of suffering humanity, and gave the screw of oppression an extra turn
because they had the power.”--_T. V. Powderly, 1885._
XII.
DEFENDING DYNAMITE ASSASSINATION.
On April 7, 1885, O’Donovan Rossa delivered an address in Tremont
Temple, Boston. From a report of his remarks which appeared in the
“Boston Herald” of April 8, the following extracts are taken:--
“The papers of New York and of Boston represented him as a man who
took dynamite to bed with him. [Laughter and cheers.] But this very
thing England used in all her wars, and now had tons of it in Woolwich.
Mr. Parnell told them two years ago that he had all the resources of
civilization at command. He meant then that he only wanted an excuse to
send over more of this destructive material. [Laughter and applause.]
Scientific warfare alarmed England, and she would like Ireland to
keep petitioning and not go to arms. Then they were asked, while they
had the Coercion Acts, to come out and fight in honorable warfare.
[Laughter.] He would rather fight in the open field if allowed, but
the speaker went in for fighting the devil with his own weapons.
[Applause.] He would not wish to hurt an Englishman, but there was
no other way to root English government from Ireland. [Cheers, and a
voice: ‘Yes, and we will root them out.’] He would show that it would
cost England more to hold Ireland than it was worth. [Cheers.] After
England had passed all her stringent laws, the recent explosions had
occurred. Until England gave up Ireland, dynamite would go in....
There might be some who did not like to deal with dynamite, but they
only wanted it done secretly. They said the speaker blew too much.
[Laughter.] Well, he had to blow a bit to get them in. He had to make
a noise, or else he would not get any aid for the men who are fighting
England so as to make her understand it would be advisable to give
Ireland a Parliament like that of 1801. [Cheers.] When they had that,
he would rest for a time. But if she wished to stop the dynamite
work in London, let her give Ireland justice. Till she did that, he
would ask the people of Boston to give all the aid they could.... In
conclusion, he asked his audience to do something to help the brave
men working for the liberty of Ireland. He said there were to-day
Irishmen working for the cause in England who had never seen America;
but the scare they were giving England in the heart of London was doing
more than twenty thousand men in the field. He did not like dynamite,
and the English did not [laughter]; but he had no objection that the
Irishmen in London or in Ireland should use all the dynamite they
could get. [Applause.] England had done all she could with fire and
sword to exterminate the race in Ireland. Why, she had sold the Irish
people as slaves. England had banished the Irish people, and she kept
doing it. He asked the chairman, if his family had been separated and
forced to go to a strange country by the work of a Government, would he
object to using dynamite, or hell-fire itself? [Great applause.]”
University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge
Transcriber’s Note
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation have been standardized but all other spelling and
punctuation remains unchanged.
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