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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.