Glory Road (37 page)

FIVE

Lincoln
Comin'
Wid His
Chariot

1. The Grapes of Wrath

Out in front there were the eternal lines of weary men in dusty blue plodding through the sunlight into heavy mist and curling smoke, and it seemed that the only reality was the hard reality of combat and death. Yet in the background there was a great force adrift, and the future was beginning to take shape. No man could say what the future would be like, yet now and then strange hints of it seemed to come down the tainted winds. The gunfire and the shouts of men in battle and the unimaginable cruelties and agonies of war seemed to lift at times to permit a glimpse of something new and incalculable, bought with the lives of men who would never see it. A young soldier who was commissioned an officer in one of the new Negro regiments this spring heard his men singing one of the hackneyed war songs:

Yes, we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again, Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

and he wrote that he had never before heard such singing.
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These colored men were not just repeating the empty words of a good marching tune. They were putting everything they had into a song that had suddenly taken on enormous meaning, and words like "the flag" and "freedom" had become revolutionary, the keys to a great future.

It might be, indeed, that this idea of freedom was something that had no limits whatever. It might begin as a limited thing, simple legal freedom from purchase and sale for the poor black man, and in the end it would become freedom for white men too, freedom also for all of the unguessed potentialities of an amazing country that had hardly begun to dream of its own destiny.

Thoughtful men occasionally talked as if they saw a gulf opening beneath their feet. Gideon Welles was as sober a conservative as party politics could bring to a president's cabinet, yet he saw something that spring as he meditated that privateering and support for blockade-runners might yet bring England into a war with America. Such a war, he wrote, could have unlooked-for consequences. Instead of being a conventional war it could bring about "an uprising of the nations." He talked with Lincoln about it, and in his diary he stated his belief: "If war is to come it looks to me as of a magnitude greater than the world has ever experienced—as it would eventuate in the upheaval of nations, the overthrow of governments and dynasties. The sympathies of the mass of mankind would be with us rather than with the decaying dynasties and the old effete governments."
²

Wendell Phillips, the gadfly of abolition, was on the rostrum that spring crying out that the power which dwelt in this idea must be used as a telling weapon. He saw the war between North and South as something infinitely portentous, not confined to one continent:

"Wherever caste lives, wherever class power exists, whether it be on the Thames or on the Seine, whether on the Ganges or on the Danube, there the South has an ally. . . . Never until we welcome the Negro, the foreigner, all races as equals, and melted together in a common nationality, hurl them all at despotism, will the North deserve triumph or earn it at the hands of a just God."
³

These were brave words, and they went farther than Phillips himself imagined. His catalogue of the rivers where caste existed was impressive but incomplete. He might have extended it: the Thames and the Seine, the Ganges and the Danube—and, very much closer home, the rolling Susquehanna as well.

Caste and despotism existed along the Susquehanna, and in 1863 some of the people most affected were rising to demand that something be done about them. They were not putting their demand in very intelligible words, for they were ignorant Irish immigrants and they had no better idea than anyone else of the ultimate meaning of a war for freedom. So confused were the times, and so mixed were the values which men believed they were serving, that these men actually seemed to be allies of the Confederacy, and patriotic Northerners tended to look upon them as traitors. But if their intent was not especially clear, either to themselves or to anyone else, they were at least speaking in a language that could not be ignored—the language of riot and gunfire and murder done in hot blood, so that the anthracite fields of eastern Pennsylvania seemed to be aflame in that spring of 1863.

On the surface, all that was happening was that the men who worked in the anthracite mines did not like either the war or the military draft and were going to extremes of violence to make their dislike known. Yet it is clear enough that the discontent went deeper than that. It went all the way down, as a matter of fact, to the injustices which the growing industrialization of a lusty, heedless country was inflicting on men who, if they did not look out, would soon be ground down into a submerged caste as unfortunate as any submerged caste along Mr. Phillips's rivers overseas. The Pennsylvania anthracite region, in short, was having a bad case of labor trouble, and since labor trouble was something relatively new in a nation which still believed itself to be a land of small farmers, it went more or less unrecognized and the authorities considered that they were dealing with a set of malignant Copperheads.

The anthracite area included principally Lackawanna, Luzerne, and Schuylkill counties. Population had mushroomed in the years just before the war, and production of anthracite had gone up from a scant million tons a year in 1840 to eight and one half million tons in 1860. Of protective legislation, mine safety regulations and the like there was not a vestige, and the clerk of the Schuylkill mining district was presently to write of "the danger to be encountered working in deep mines" in which "standing gas, decay of timber, the absence of ventilation, and standing water" made working conditions perilous. Within recent memories, mines had been small and each mine owner knew personally his handful of workers and was on friendly terms with them. The small holdings had coalesced into large ones, mutual acquaintance and understanding had vanished, and the average miner knew the owner of his mine only through the "ticket boss," who checked the cars of mined coal and so determined, impersonally, how much each man's earnings would be. Competition for labor had disappeared, and large numbers of penniless Irish were imported to work in the diggings. The era of company housing had arrived—very bad housing, most of it, with one room downstairs and two above, furnished with bedsteads made of square timbers by company carpenters, a rough table, and a few benches, with an open grate built into one wall for cooking and heating. Along with company housing came the company store, run in such a way that many miners received no pay whatever for their work. (A full decade after the war a Pennsylvania legislator felt it necessary to introduce a bill to require coal companies to pay their workers in cash.)
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On top of all of this there were acute racial and religious difficulties. The miners were Irish and the mine bosses, to a man, were English, Welsh, or Scotch. The grip of the Know-Nothing movement was upon the land, and "No Irish Need Apply" signs were common in city employment offices. Native Americans looked upon the Irish miners as an uncouth lawless group given to fighting and drunkenness, the squalor of their existence somehow a national characteristic rather than the end product of bad pay and worse housing. The miners had never been received into the community. They were outsiders and they were made to feel that way, an oppressed class, exploited in every conceivable way by a country which seemed determined to convince them that they did not belong. As a recent student of the case has remarked: "The situation in the Pennsylvania anthracite coal fields in the middle of the nineteenth century was such, in short, that industrial strife and disorder were to be anticipated. If one sought to improvise a combination of factors calculated to produce trouble, he could hardly hope to improve on the example offered by eastern Pennsylvania."
⁵

So here, although he never dreamed of it, was what Wendell Phillips had been talking about. The war had brought all of these pressures to a head and had laid on top of them the exciting idea that freedom was a thing which men in this land would fight and die for. As an inevitable result there was an uprising going on.

It was the draft which touched off the trouble. Plenty of recruits had been obtained from the anthracite area. The 48th Pennsylvania, which was a first-class outfit, was famous as a regiment of Schuylkill County coal miners, and in 1864 in front of Petersburg its miners were to dig the long tunnel which resulted in the famous battle of the crater.
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It does not appear that the miners' objection to the draft reflected any especial reluctance to fight. Rather, it grew out of deep dissatisfaction with intolerable conditions of life, which made the draft look like one injustice too many. Men were compelled to enroll for the draft. Any man who had three hundred dollars (which no miner had) could buy exemption if his name was called. There was a suspicion that men considered "undesirable" in any mining community by the mine bosses were sure to be called up first, and tales were told of drafted miners being tied to cavalrymen's stirrups and marched off to war willy-nilly. All of the resentment which these Irish immigrants felt because of their second-class status boiled over, and there was bloodshed.
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It had begun the previous fall in a little mining town where a crowd of men beat a mine boss to death after an argument about the war. Not long after, in a neighboring town, two hundred miners raided a colliery, beat up the office staff, took possession of the company store, fired shots in the air, and announced that they would really make trouble if the hated store were ever reopened. Mobs visited homes of men supposed to be in sympathy with the draft, hauled them out of bed, and killed them. Organized bands appeared to have complete control over many parts of the anthracite region. A Pennsylvania newspaper asserted that the disturbances were the work of a mysterious secret organization known as the Molly Maguires.

It is very comforting in time of war or other national emergency to be able to see all colors as straight blacks or whites. Secretary Stanton saw things that way, and to him this whole affair was a Copperhead plot in which the emissaries of Jefferson Davis had doubtless been active. But the real difficulty would seem to have been that the miners were trying, somewhat ineptly perhaps, to put on some sort of labor-union organizing drive. There was a slightly vague Workingmen's Benevolent Association somewhere back of that Molly Maguire label; the miners for years had been making fitful efforts to get an effective labor organization started, and in the conditions then prevailing in the coal fields a union had to be both conspiratorial and militant if it hoped to survive. Under all of the talk about Copperheads and traitors, a bitter clash of economic interests is easily discernible. The retail price of coal in the cities had gone sky-high, and there was talk that this was all due to the greed and the violent behavior of the miners. A citizen of Mauch Chunk wrote in outrage that the rioters "dictate the price for their work, and if their employers don't accede they destroy and burn coal breakers, houses, and prevent those disposed from working." As remedies, he demanded that a large military force be sent to the coal fields, that martial law be declared, and that "summary justice be dealt out to these traitors." He also proposed that "protection be afforded to those willing to work."
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The civil authorities often appeared to be powerless, or at least in many cases very reluctant to use what powers they did have. General Couch, who was now commanding the military in Pennsylvania, wrote that "the ignorant miners have no fear of God, the state authorities or the Devil," and added that "the Democratic leaders have not the power of burnt flax over them for good." It seemed, indeed, that there was a good deal of sympathy for the miners. Governor Curtin flatly refused to use the state militia to enforce the draft in the coal fields, and in Schuylkill County, where the trouble was worst, it was alleged that the Molly Maguires dominated county politics and had judges and jurors under their thumbs. Couch reported that nothing but a vigorous use of Federal troops would answer.
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Stanton agreed with him, and various detachments were sent into Pennsylvania. In at least one of these regiments, the 10th New Jersey, the soldiers themselves became sympathetic with the miners, and in the end the regiment's colonel begged the War Department to send his outfit back to the Army of the Potomac before it got entirely out of hand.
¹⁰

The Pennsylvania politician in charge of conscription was A. K. McClure, the editor-politician who had a knack for getting oil onto troubled waters. His draft commissioner for Schuylkill County was another editor named Benjamin Bannan, and when Bannan drew a list of conscripts and notified the men that they must take a train for Harrisburg, where blue uniforms awaited them, the waters beca
me troubled enough to demand McCl
ure's attention. A few of the draftees were farmers, who seemed ready enough to go. Most of them were miners, who announced that they would go under no circumstances whatever. When departure day came a huge mob of miners surrounded the train, turned all of the draftees loose, and completely nullified the whole procedure.

Stanton took fire and sent word that the draft must be enforced "at the point of the bayonet" if necessary. McClure and Curtin begged him to go slow, but Stanton would not cool off, and the regiments showed up next day, ready for business. Then McClure did what hard-pressed public officials so often did in those days: he dumped the whole problem in Lincoln's lap via a carefully worded telegram in cipher.