What makes America America?
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.