A Passionate Girl (15 page)

I rode back to the hotel feeling proud of myself. In spite of male contempt and the blazing heat of July, I had taught myself to do a difficult thing. I felt a little more equal to dealing with this tumultuous, bewildering American world. And with Dan McCaffrey.

Walking down Broadway, surrounded by ladies wearing expensive, gaily striped dresses in the latest Paris fashion, I found myself reciting an old Celtic charm. “May I be an island in the sea. May I be a hill on the land. I shall wound every man. No man shall hurt me.”

I was still in this bitter mood when I left New York for Washington, D.C., three days later with Dan McCaffrey, Red Mike Hanrahan, and Colonel William Roberts. Dan was equally sour and silent. Red Mike tried to cheer us up by telling us the story of his improbable life, from his birth in India, the son of an Irish sergeant in the British Army, through stints on the London stage, in the California Gold Rush of '49, and in the Union Army. When this failed, he tried reciting endless verses of “Brian O'Linn,” a comic poem about an Irish idiot who always made the best of everything. This failed as miserably as his first effort.

Colonel Roberts, egotism personified, scarcely noticed our gloom. He was ebullient. A Fenian regiment had marched in the big parade that had welcomed General Grant to New York the previous day. They had worn the blue of the Union Army, with bands of green ribbon on their sleeves. Roberts told us that the general had noticed them and asked who they were. When he was told, he replied, “More power to them.”

I struggled to raise my spirits by taking an interest in my new surroundings. It was my first trip on an American train. I had ridden trains in Ireland on trips to Dublin to visit Michael at the university, but nothing in their plain decor prepared me for the American parlor car. The seats were upholstered in deep carmine and golden-olive velvet plush. Each window had curtains of salmon-colored cloth, stiff in patterns of gold bullion. From the ceiling hung large double silver chandeliers. It was the last car on the train and had an observation platform on which you could stand to let the wind whip you.

We departed from Jersey City on the New Jersey Railroad. At New Brunswick, they uncoupled our car and attached it to an engine of the Camden & Amboy Railroad, which hauled us the rest of the way through the state of New Jersey. Its neat farms and prosperous towns were my first glimpse of America beyond New York. At Camden we rumbled across the Delaware to Philadelphia, where we changed trains entirely, this time to the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad. Our new parlor car was even more gorgeous. Instead of double seats, there were armchairs, upholstered in scarlet velvet. On the floor was a magnificent Turkish carpet, and each armchair had a small table beside it for magazines and books. A large, ornate fountain at one end of the car contained ice water, which we drank greedily. It was very hot.

I remarked that nothing in Ireland compared to such summer heat. Dan laughed briefly and said, “This is nothin'. You should visit Memphis in July.”

“You will, if all goes well,” said Colonel Roberts. He hoped to send us on a fund-raising tour around the whole country, from Boston to New Orleans and as far west as St. Louis and Chicago. He spread a map on his table and pointed to dozens of cities and towns. There were now over four hundred Fenian circles, and the membership had risen to twenty-five thousand. They hoped to double it within the year—with the help of the Fenian girl. They planned to enlist Irish women in an auxiliary called the Fenian Sisterhood.

Colonel Roberts talked roundly about the size and power of the United States. It was well on its way to becoming the greatest nation in the world. Already it had more railroads, bridges, and steel and textile factories than any other country except England, and it was only a matter of time before we challenged her power. The English knew this, and that was why they had attempted to wreck America by supporting the Southern Confederates. It was inevitable that America and England were going to fight for leadership of the world. Both countries knew it, and that was among several reasons why Colonel Roberts was convinced that we had a good chance to win American support for the Fenian invasion of Canada. He had been to Washington several times in the last few months, and numerous congressmen and influential generals had privately assured him that they favored kicking the British out of Canada as a first step to smashing them in the inevitable war.

Colonel Roberts had been a successful dry-goods merchant and had served in the Union Army's commissary department during the war. He had a head for figures, and he stunned us by rolling off his tongue spectacular summaries of America's immensity. From sea to sea, the nation now comprised 3,025,000 square miles. Of the 1,936 billion acres in the national domain, no less than a billion had not yet been settled. Stretching away to the Rocky Mountains and over them to the Pacific lay an empire three times larger than the entire country when it gained its independence from England in 1783. If this great wilderness were populated as densely as England, it would furnish homes for 539 million men, women, and children. In this year alone they expected to take $16 million in gold from the territory of Montana. The transactions of brokers in Wall Street for the year ending June 30, 1865 reached 6 billion dollars. A single block of land in New York had recently been sold for $500,000. The Internal Revenue Department reported that $7 million was spent each year in New York alone on theaters and restaurants. In the final year of the war, the North spent $3 billion to support its armies.

“I calculate that we can conquer Canada for ten million,” Roberts said. “Chicken feed!”

“Red Mike Chicken, formerly Hanrahan, reporting for duty,” cried Mike, springing up and saluting.

Arriving in Washington, D.C., in the late afternoon with these stupendous numbers rattling in my head, I expected to encounter a capital out of the Arabian nights, a metropolis of marble and gold, teeming with monumental magnificence. I was shocked to discover a shabby, dirty town, not much bigger than the city of Limerick. The public buildings, which were still draped with black in mourning for the fallen Lincoln, stood like absentminded fits of grandiosity in the midst of swamps and open fields. The one truly striking edifice was the Capitol, which Mr. Lincoln had insisted on completing in spite of the toils and expense of the Civil War. Its superb dome, topped by a statue of Freedom leaning on a sheathed sword, caught the breath. But all around this glorious building were blocks of crumbling old houses.

Pennsylvania Avenue, the main thoroughfare from the capitol into the heart of the city, was as full of ruts and holes as any country road in Ireland. As we reached an intersection in our open carriage, we were engulfed by a hot wind blowing a dust storm, known in Washington as a “Sahara.” It almost choked us. The south side of the Avenue was lined with dingy buildings and an agglomeration of sheds and shacks that served as the city market. On the north side was one of the few sidewalks, and the town's hotels and restaurants. Immediately north of the Avenue, between the Capitol and the Executive Mansion, was the only part of Washington which was sufficiently built up to warrant the designation of a city. Houses, churches, school buildings were crowded here, but all seemed done in a small way, built without attention to appearance or comfort. There was an abundance of petty rooming houses and cheap restaurants and saloons to serve the poorly paid clerks who worked for the government.

Colonel Roberts, oblivious to the contradiction between his words and his previous statistical paean to America, began damning Washington as the worst city on earth. There was not a streetcar in the place. A few straggling omnibuses and helter-skelter hacks were the only public transportation. A pedestrian often had to walk blocks before he or she found it possible to cross a single street, so deep and pervasive was the spring and summer mud. And the temperature! It made the heat of New York seem like an autumn zephyr. We struggled to our rooms on the third floor of the Hotel Willard and collapsed.

At dinner we were joined by new allies—the man who had recruited Dan into the Fenians, Colonel John O'Neil, and his wife, Margaret. He was a smashingly handsome black-haired Irishman in his mid-thirties. His wife was five or six years younger, a brunette, with a rather homely mannish face and a solemn manner. The sight of O'Neil did wonders for Dan. His surly mood vanished, and he became an eager inquirer into the political and social doings of Tennessee. He asked for news of friends, for prognostications of the future.

Alas, Colonel O'Neil had little good to tell him. Few of his friends, most of whom were Confederate sympathizers, had stayed in the state. O'Neil's reply became a kind of grim litany. “Confiscated, gone to Mexico. Bankrupt. Gone to California.” The state was being ruled by a man whom both O'Neil, who had fought for the Union, and Dan seemed equally to despise, a Methodist minister named William Brownlow. Middle Tennessee, where Dan lived, and East Tennessee were still under martial law, which meant a man could be shot for disobeying a soldier's order. What was even more confusing to an outsider, this “Parson” Brownlow, who had supported the Union, was a violent foe of President Andrew Johnson, who was also from Tennessee. The two men had hated each other for years.

The intricacies of American politics were truly bewildering for an outsider. I said as much to Red Mike Hanrahan. He laughed and said most of the confusion was caused by the war. “Before that craziness began, everyone was either a Democrat or a Republican. But a lot of Democrats pitched in with the Republicans to fight the war. A good many simpletons like meself joined up for the same reason, to save the Union. The next thing we knew, we were fightin' to free the slaves. On those terms they wouldn't have gotten ten Irishmen into the army from Philadelphia to Boston. Now there's Democrats by the tens of thousands wakin' up like drunks the mornin' after a bender and vowin' to swear off Republicanism for life.”

This, Colonel Roberts said, was Ireland's opportunity. President Johnson was a Democrat. Lincoln had chosen him to run with him on his Republican Party ticket to create a united front for the war effort. Johnson would listen to Irish Democrats from Tennessee. That explained Colonel O'Neil's presence.

Our spirits were high that night. We soared on hope and bid defiance to all other faiths but our own. John O'Neil raised his glass of bourbon, a drink much favored in Tennessee, and tried to make our optimism into an antidote to his wife's worries about the Fenian cause. “We'll make a convert of you yet,” he said. His tongue loosened by the liquor, he told us how they had met, while she blushed and tried to silence him. In the winter of 1862, he had been carried into a Nashville hospital almost dead of a stomach wound.

“I thought I was in heaven for sure,” he said. “There was the most beautiful creature I've ever seen looking down on me in a dress all of white, a rosary tied about her waist. 'Twas Margaret.”

She had been a Sister of Mercy, working in a hospital founded by her order. They had opened their doors to the wounded of both sides. It was a horrible time. The dying filled the rooms and corridors. Her care had not a little to do with saving John O'Neil's life. During his convalescence, they fell in love. She was Irish, from Kerry, the same county from which O'Neil's parents had come. Finally she went to her mother superior and told her that she could no longer obey her vows. She was driven from the hospital like a scarlet woman. Colonel O'Neil, his health restored, instantly proposed.

With much sadness, we discussed the Catholic Church's blind severity toward those who refused to conform to all its dictates. So often, they seemed to want obedient automatons, rather than men and women who pledged their religious faith yet retained the right to think and act freely. They would have to change their ways if they wanted to keep the allegiance of Irish-Americans, Red Mike said. Colonel Roberts agreed. The success of the Fenians in the teeth of clerical opposition was proof of the power of American freedom. I studied Margaret O'Neil while this conversation went back and forth. She did not respond to it. I sensed a troubled soul.

“Are these the representatives of the Irish Republic?” asked a voice from behind me.

“Indeed we are,” said Colonel Roberts to the trim, elegantly dressed man who asked the question. “And of the New York Democracy.”

“A formidable combination,” said our visitor, as Roberts rose to introduce him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the honorable Fernando Wood, congressman from New York and former mayor of our fair city.”

“I have here a telegram from Mr. Tweed, directing me to present you with the keys to the city—and to the U.S. Mint, if possible,” said Congressman Wood.

He was a cool, debonair man with a narrow, sharp-nosed face behind a precisely curled black mustache. He carried himself with the ramrod posture of a colonel of the British Guards. There were touches of gray in his hair, but he nonetheless emanated an intense, astringent vitality.

“Is this the Fenian girl?” he said, smiling down at me.

“None other,” said Colonel Roberts.

“Those newspaper sketchers should be shot for treason to Ireland,” he said. “They haven't even come close to doing you justice.”

I found myself blushing beneath his direct, steady stare.

“I envy your passionate dedication to your cause,” he said. “Although I'm convinced that passion and politics don't mix.”

“Perhaps there are some causes that demand passion,” I said.

“I think not,” he said. “I fear there are people who must have it, to feed a passionate nature. I hope you can profit from the example of our Southern friends and mix some policy with your passion.”

“That is precisely what we've come to Washington to do,” said William Roberts. “But I wonder what help you can give us, Congressman. I'm surprised that Bill Tweed could not have found a stronger voice for us. Forgive my frankness, but we have no time for niceties.”

“I've long been a friend of political candor,” Wood said. “I can give you very little help personally. I'm obnoxious to the president and all the other strutting, crowing victors. But I know what's happening in Washington. That may be one reason Tweed sent me to you. The other may have been to let me know that you're his political property, and I had better keep my distance.”

“We're no one's political property,” Roberts said.