AN
ADVERTISMENT FOR MYSELF
“He
who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.”
—John
L. Lewis
Richard
Snow and Fred Allen, the agreeable gentlemen who edit this column,
suggested that this time out I write something on my new book,
a historical novel called Paradise Alley. They had to insist for
all of about twenty seconds or so before I would agree to do anything
so immodest.
Paradise
Alley is set during the fateful month of July, 1863, and it is
about both the Irish immigrant experience and one of the lesser
known but most critical episodes in our history, the New York
City draft riots.
“Riots”
may be a mild word to describe them. As one observer said at the
time, it was not so much a riot as a revolution; a five-day, pitched
battle in the streets for control of the city itself, with the
fate of the Union hanging in the balance. It is generally considered
to be the worst civic disturbance in our history, easily outstripping
the deadliest riots of the 1960s. Before it was over at least
119 people were dead, untold millions of dollars worth of property
had been destroyed, and the city had been subjected to a display
of savagery rarely equaled even on the battlefield.
The
ferocity of the rioters was such that they sound nearly possessed.
One rampaging mob burned the city’s Colored Orphans’
Asylum to the ground—while gleefully chanting, “Burn
the niggers’ nest!” Another tortured a state militia
colonel in the street for hours, before finally killing him and
setting him on fire. Other rioters beat New York’s superintendent
of police—a man named John Kennedy—into unconsciousness
and left him for dead; still more viciously mutilated and lynched
any African Americans they could get their hands on. Even when
massed infantry and artillery showed up, hastily summoned from
the battlefield of Gettysburg, the mobs did not desist. Men armed
largely with clubs and bricks charged repeatedly into the guns,
urged on by women shrieking “Die at home!”
Who
were these people, and what could possibly have put them into
such a rage? How can we recognize them as our fellow Americans—and
how can it be that we have so expunged these terrible days from
our national memory?
It
is pretty much an axiom of the human condition that those who
have been brutalized will make the best brutalizers. Sad to say—particularly
for your (mostly) Irish-American correspondent—the bulk
of the rioters were Irish immigrants. These were often people
who had endured the potato famine of the 1840s, something that
sounds almost quaint to our ears now, like green beer on St. Patty’s
Day, but which was a very real, human catastrophe; killing some
one-and-a-half million people out of an Irish population of eight
million at the time. The survivors had made a harrowing passage
across the Atlantic in the notorious “coffin ships,”
arriving in America only to find themselves thoroughly despised
for their language, their customs, their poverty, and above all
their Catholic faith.
They
had always been chary about the war. It was run, after all, mostly
by Protestant, Anglo-American Republicans, many of whom had been
members of the virulently anti-Catholic Nativist party just a
few years before. Nor did the Irish look forward to millions of
freed slaves making their way up North. Clinging precariously
to the very bottom rung of white American society, the Irish had
forcibly taken most of the menial and domestic jobs away from
African Americans on their arrival in New York. They were not
eager for a renewed competition.
Nonetheless,
the Irish had signed up by the hundreds of thousands to fight
for the Union—only to be slaughtered in droves, often thanks
to incompetent, “political generals” drawn from the
ranks of those same, Protestant Republicans. Back in New York,
their families were destitute, overwhelmed by wartime inflation
and all but abandoned by a city which considered an adequate relief
system to be the assignment of pious, upper-class women to visit
them in their homes, and there read aloud to them from Ben Franklin’s
essay on economy.
The
imposition of the nation’s first military draft was the
last straw. Particularly galling was the provision that allowed
anyone to buy their way out of the war by paying $300 for a “substitute”—a
sum equivalent to a full year’s wages for an average workingman.
When the draft office opened on its second day, the fury of the
lower wards could be contained no longer. A mob led by the appropriately
named “Black Joke” fire company attacked the provost
marshal and his men, beat them up, and set both the draft office
and all the draft records on fire. The riot was on.
The
natural drama of this story always seemed obvious to me. If anything,
I found there was a surfeit of material to work with, which is
one of the great advantages of writing historical fiction. The
actual events of the past—particularly the American past—are
more amazing than anything one can invent.
There
is so much that even the most incidental details can tell one
about a place and a time. Residents of Civil War New York, for
instance, included both a young Billy the Kid, and Winston Churchill’s
grandfather, Leonard Jerome, then part-owner of The New York Times,
who spent the riot perched behind a gatling gun, mounted in the
window of his newspaper. Or there was the fact that New York’s
sewers were so poorly constructed that the lightest rain would
fill the gutters with butcher’s offal, and small boys could
be seen sailing paper boats in pools of blood. Or those volunteer
firemen, who ran out to fires, pulling their own machines behind
a boy blowing a silver trumpet, and who fought with each other
over the hydrants, and were entertained at their work by the city’s
finest “fire tenors.”
Then
there were the pigs. They ran loose on the streets of New York
at the time—something that disgusted well-bred visitors
and residents alike. Here is where our perceptions of history
are liable to interpretation, though. It occurred to me that pigs
running wild must have looked entirely different to the immigrants
themselves. To men and women who had been through the famine,
and for whom slaughtering the treasured family pig was the last,
desperate measure before facing starvation—to them, the
pigs must have made it seem as if the streets were paved with
gold.
And
therein lies the paradox of the immigrant experience. For all
the pent-up fury of the mobs, for all the atrocities they committed—it
was also their fellow immigrants who suppressed the uprising.
Many of the troops who were hurried back to the city were Irish-Americans
themselves, including the fabled “Fighting 69th” regiment.
So too were most of New York’s police; this would be their
finest hour, holding the city in the Union by the strength of
their locust clubs, against overwhelming odds. For all they had
been subjected to, for all that they could have stooped to lawlessness
and depravity, enough of the immigrants found America worth preserving,
even if it meant fighting their friends and neighbors in the streets.
How,
then, to put a human face to this epic story? Again, I was lucky
in what the historical record had left me. Paradise Alley has
many characters, male and female—a New York City fireman
turned soldier; a hack journalist, an attendant at the Colored
Orphans’ Asylum—but it is centered around a trinity
of Irish women living in the squalid Fourth Ward, on the Lower
East Side of Manhattan.
Deirdre
Dolan is one of the many “lace-curtain Irish,” based
closely upon the countless young women who came to this country
to work as domestics, aspiring to a house and a home and middle-class
respectability of their own. Maddy Boyle is modeled after a real-life
prostitute of the time; an Irishwoman named Mary Burke who, when
the mob came after her for the great crime of having black clients,
fired a pistol at them and cursed them for “Irish sons-of-bitches!”—and
to understand what she meant is to truly know what it means to
be Irish.
The
third woman, Ruth Dove, is also based very closely on a real person,
a Mrs. William Derrickson, of Worth Street—a white, Irish
woman who was married to a black man. Her husband was not at home
when the riot started, and when the mob came she went out into
the street herself to defy them, and to try to save her teenaged
son from being lynched.
For
this is the immigrant story, too. It is one of monumental courage,
and not just the courage to survive, to endure—but also
to embrace the new country, and to rise above the past. Intermarriage
was not prevalent in antebellum New York, but it was not uncommon,
either, and while the draft riots were first and foremost a racial
tragedy, there were also whites—most notably the police—who
sheltered and defended African Americans against the mobs. This
was just one small measure, one cautious step forward, toward
realizing the freedom and dignity that America had always promised,
but was tardy in delivering.
It
is already a great story. I just hope I have given it the book
it deserves.
