A Nation Rising (18 page)

On May 10, 1842, President Tyler told Congress that the fighting was near an end, and the war was officially declared over on August 14, 1842. In 1849, a small disturbance flared up again. Known as the Third Seminole War, it led to another sixty Indians' being removed to the west.

By 1850, Indian removal had been accomplished.

 

“P
ROMISES
,
TREATIES
,
AND
assurances of fatherly solicitude and care were in the end, worth nothing. For public consumption and to assuage private consciences, advocates of removal used the language of religion or of paternalism,” Jon Meacham concluded in
American Lion
, his biography of Jackson. “Jackson spoke of himself as the Indians' ‘Great Father' all the time—and he almost certainly believed what he was saying. He thought he knew best, and he had
convinced himself long before that he was acting in the best interests of both the Indians and the white settlers. But the raw fact remains that the American government—and by extension, the American people of the time—wanted the land. So they took it.”
²⁴

 

W
ITH THE
I
NDIAN
“problem” solved east of the Mississippi, the quest for land—and the controversy over whether or not slaves would work that land—did not go away. The problem of slavery in the new territories kept moving farther west as Americans continued to stretch their way across the continent. The next battlegrounds would come as Americans moved into another vestige of Spanish colonial America—Mexico.

The battle over the annexation of Texas by the United States—a breakaway republic recognized by Andrew Jackson on his last day in office in March 1837—and the war with Mexico, begun in 1846, were symptoms of a larger frenzy that was sweeping through America like a virus.

In 1845—the year of Andrew Jackson's death—this fervor was given a name. In a contemporary expansionist periodical,
The United States Magazine and Democratic Review
, the journalist John L. O'Sullivan wrote of “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

O'Sullivan's phrase, “manifest destiny,” was quickly adopted by other publications and politicians. It succinctly expressed a vision, or a quasi-religious mission. Behind this vision was some ideological saber rattling. But the greatest motivator was the insatiable appe
tite for territory, the force that had driven two American generals turned president, George Washington and Andrew Jackson.

The obsessive desire for Americans to control the entire continent from Atlantic to Pacific had become the Holy Grail in America. As each successive generation pushed the fringes of civilization a little farther, this idea took on the passion of a sacred quest. The rapid westward movement of large groups of settlers was spurred by the development of the famous trails to the West. The Santa Fe Trail linked Independence, Missouri, with the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. The Oregon Trail, mapped by trappers and missionaries, went northwest to the Oregon Territory. The Mormon Trail, first traveled in 1847, initially took the controversial religious group and then other settlers from Illinois to Salt Lake City. And in the Southwest, the Oxbow Route, from Missouri west to California, carried mail under a federal contract.

The fact that California, with its great ports, was still part of Mexico, and that England still laid claim to Oregon, only heightened the aggressiveness of the American desire to control it all.

1834
The Ursuline Convent in Somerville, near Boston, is burned to the ground by a Protestant mob in August.

1835
In Brussels, Alexis de Tocqueville publishes
Democracy in America
.

 

1836
In Philadelphia in January, James Birney publishes the first issue of
The Philanthropist
, another antislavery newspaper.

1838
Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hall, the site of antislavery meetings, is burned to the ground by a pro-slavery mob in May.

 

1844
The first telegraphic message—“What hath God wrought!”—is sent from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore by Samuel F. B. Morse on May 24.

1845
Florida is admitted to the Union as a slave state (the twenty-seventh state).

1846
War is declared on Mexico on May 13.

May–July 1844

T
HE BLOODSHED BEGAN
over the Bible.

In 1844 Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, was not very brotherly. And there wasn't much love.

On Friday, May 3, 1844, the American Republican Party, an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Protestant group also known as the Nativist Party, set up a platform to hold a meeting—a “Save the Bible” rally—in the Third Ward of Kensington, then a predominantly Irish suburb of Philadelphia. The speakers delivered a series of invective-filled tirades directed against the Irish, the pope, the Catholic Church, and immigrants. All of them, including some of Philadelphia's Protestant clergymen, railed that the Germans and Irish “wanted to get the Constitution of the U.S. into their own hands and sell it to a foreign power.”

At the heart of their anger was a belief, widely held among
Philadelphia's Protestants, that the city's Catholic bishop, Dublin-born Francis Patrick Kenrick, was trying to remove the Bible from Philadelphia's public schools. These rumors were part of a much more widespread and virulent conspiracy theory—widely held by nineteenth-century Americans—that the pope was planning to take over America.

During the deadly cholera epidemic that swept Philadelphia in 1832, killing more than 1,000 people, Bishop Kenrick had won praise for his unstinting efforts in battling the contagion and tending its victims. Part of a worldwide cholera pandemic, which also struck New York, New Haven, Boston, and other New England cities that year, Philadelphia's outbreak was blamed on immigrants, and the Irish in particular. Since the cause of cholera—water contaminated by feces—was not yet understood and recent Irish immigrants were most likely to live in the crowded, squalid conditions that fostered cholera, it was a short step to blame them for the deadly outbreak.

As was typical of immigrant populations in urban areas, the Irish actually suffered disproportionately during the crisis. A large number of Irish laborers had arrived in Philadelphia to work on construction of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, a pioneering railroad and canal project begun in 1829. In 2009, a mass grave with the remains of fifty-seven Irish railroad workers, probably victims of the epidemic but whose fate was unknown, was discovered near Philadelphia. The section of the old railroad running from the city to western suburbs was called the “Main Line of Public Works,” and is still known as the Main Line.

The city's Irish enclave was mushrooming when the cholera
epidemic of 1832 struck and, as noted above, many Philadelphians blamed the outbreak on these Irish immigrants. That idea was reinforced in 1837 by an epidemic of typhus, which was widely called the “Irish disease” and is spread by lice. In his history of the Irish in Philadelphia, Dennis Clark wrote, “The republic was building, and the work to be done strained at the backs of immigrant and native alike. [The Irish were] clannish, politically sensitive and intolerant of interference. In the alleys where they lived, conditions did not breed tolerance. In 1832, a citizens' committee found in a workers' area near the Delaware fifty-five families without a single privy for their use.”
²

Among many Americans of the era, fears about religion, sanitation, politics, and economics were fueled by vitriolic propaganda. Over the following years, anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments in mainstream Protestant America deepened, as the flow of immigrants increased. As the essayist and novelist Peter Quinn wrote, “The Irish were swiftly identified in the popular mind with poverty, disease, alcohol abuse, crime and violence—all the enduring pathologies of the urban poor. Indeed the level of social turmoil that followed the Irish into America's cities would not be seen again for another century, until the massive exodus of African Americans from the rural South to urban North.”
³

On this warm May afternoon in 1844, the crowd of Protestant Nativists was fairly small, possibly numbering 100. When a group of Irish residents—most of them unemployed young locals, just hanging about—jeered and then started to tear down the platform, the Nativist speakers and the crowd retreated.

But three days later, on Monday, May 6, the Nativists returned
in force, now numbering some 3,000. When it began to rain, they moved their rally to the nearby “Nanny Goat Market,” an Irish marketplace, where the inflammatory remarks continued to flow from the speakers, some of them evangelical Protestant clergymen. The Irish were derided as “scum unloaded on American wharves.”

Again, the Irish locals responded to the Protestant speakers' invective with heckling and jeers. According to many accounts of these events, alcohol seemed to flow as freely as the insults. Nineteenth-century Americans were often hard drinkers, and cheap whiskey was more available than fresh water. Words soon became shoves, and fistfights broke out. As crowds of Irish and Nativists pressed toward each other, one man pulled out a pistol. Shots were fired, and soon more weapons were produced. Rocks and clubs were rapidly added to the mix. When one Irishman, Patrick Fisher, attempted to stop a fight, he was shot in the face.

The violence quickly escalated as Irish residents began sniping at the Protestant Nativists from their homes and rooftops. Exposed in the open market, the crowd of Protestants made easy targets. An eighteen-year-old Protestant leather tanner, George Schiffler, was hit and died instantly, the first casualty of the Philadelphia “Bible Riots.”

As the fighting spread through the Irish neighborhood, some of the Nativists went looking for reinforcements, and groups of armed Protestants soon began to arrive. Fueled by alcohol, they set about stoning houses and breaking windows and doors. When the sheriff and his deputies arrived to bring the melee under control, they were armed only with clubs and were seriously outnumbered. The sheriff requested help from the state militia but was turned down by its commander, General Cadwalader. By nightfall, Nativist gangs were
wreaking havoc all over Kensington, breaking into houses, destroying buildings, and driving Irish families from their homes. Bonfires flickered around the smoldering neighborhood.

The rioting subsided as the evening wore on, slowly dissipating after the long hours of street-by-street fighting. But sporadic gunfire could be heard throughout the night.

Overnight, the Nativist Party produced flyers offering a $1,000 reward for the killers of George Schiffler, the young man who had been the first to fall. Schiffler was going to be turned into a Nativist martyr. The flyers called for an outpouring of Protestant strength, and advised, “Let Every Man Come Prepared to Defend Himself.” On the following morning, an extremist Nativist newspaper compared the previous night's action to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France, where thousands of Protestants had been murdered by organized Catholic mobs in 1572: “The bloody hand of the Pope has stretched forth to our destruction. Now we call on our fellow citizens, who regard free institutions, whether they be native or adopted, to arm. Our liberties are now to be fought for—let us not be slack in our preparations.”

Spurred on by the propaganda and the deaths of several Protestants, the Nativists returned to Kensington, well armed this time. At least 3,000 strong, they spent the next day and night burning down houses. The roving bands of Nativists carried a tattered American flag with a banner attached that read, “This is the flag that was trampled underfoot by the
Irish Papists
.”

Inside the Hibernia Hose House, a volunteer fire brigade and Irish meetinghouse, Catholic defenders awaited the onslaught of the Protestant mob. When the Catholics opened fire, the Protestants
returned it, and a full-scale pitched gun battle for Kensington was again under way. Four Protestants were killed in the shooting. Retaliating, the Nativists began to torch the neighborhood, and the old wooden structures were soon blazing.

By the day's end, the fires had destroyed the Hibernia fire station, thirty Irish homes, and a market. The crowd dispersed only after the arrival of a militia force, led by General John Cadwalader, scion of one of Philadelphia's most prominent families and a descendant of a Revolutionary War hero of the same name.
*
Cadwalader's troops were able to restore order, and Bishop Kenrick issued a statement imploring his Catholic flock not to resort to violence. When the rioting continued on Wednesday, May 8, Protestant Nativists dominated it. After setting fire to more houses, they headed for St. Michael's Catholic Church and its rectory, which were guarded by a small militia detachment. Father Michael Donohoe, the rector, was an outspoken critic of the Protestant religious practices forced on Catholic children in the city's public schools.

Targeted by the mobs, Donohoe had left town earlier in the week. Unappeased, the Nativist mobs set still more fires, broke into
St. Michael's, destroyed the rectory, and threw Donohoe's entire library into the street. The church building was then set afire, and it burned until its steeple came crashing down, to Nativist cheers. Many of the Protestants were drunk—or at least drinking.

Seeing one Catholic church in flames, the Nativist crowd next marched on the seminary run by the Sisters of Charity, who had won praise during the cholera epidemic for their fearless devotion to tending the sick. Although the nuns had left the building, a housekeeper was hit in the face with a stone when she opened the door. Despite being cautioned to restrain themselves, Irish Catholics guarding a nearby church could hold back no longer. They opened fire on the Protestants, killing one man instantly and fatally wounding another. The seminary and several homes were then set ablaze before soldiers arrived and the fires were finally contained.

Kensington's mayor, John Morin Scott, had stationed troops near St. Augustine's Church, located on Fourth Street between Vine and New Streets, and was trying to restore order. When Scott was hit in the chest with a stone, the rioters went ahead and burned down the building, cheering as another Catholic steeple collapsed. That marked the end of the Kensington riots, with a death toll of at least seven, and more than twenty wounded, two of them fatally. Some 300 Irish Catholics had been forced to flee their homes.

In the following days, Mayor Scott established a force to protect Catholic churches, and Bishop Kenrick ordered all churches to be closed on the approaching Sunday, May 12, to avoid any further provocations. But the violence seemed to have spent itself, and an uneasy calm settled on a smoldering and badly damaged Philadelphia.

With the approach of Independence Day, however, threats of violence began to be whispered once more. The riots in May had strengthened the number and resolve of the Protestant forces. On July 4, thousands of people marched through Philadelphia in a stark show of strength by the growing Native American Party. The parade was pro-American, anti-Irish, and anti-Catholic. What began as a celebration of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” in the birthplace of the Declaration descended quickly into a bacchanal of bigotry.

Responding to the rumors of another Nativist rally around the birthday of American independence, the parishioners at St. Philip Neri Church in Southwark, another Catholic neighborhood in Philadelphia, had requested permission from the governor to form a militia and draw twenty muskets from the town arsenal.

Before the parade had stepped off, word got out that the governor had agreed to allow the Irish in Southwark to keep arms on hand for their defense. This news seemed to provoke even more Protestant anger. In an attempt to placate the mob, the sheriff removed the guns from St. Philip Neri on the morning of July 4. But his gesture did nothing to placate the Protestant crowds, and the mood turned even more ugly and threatening. The parade became a Protestant rally, but even so, there was no confrontation.

That would change two days later. On July 6, a mob gathered outside the church, which was now guarded by local militiamen. By the early morning of July 7, the Nativist crowds had intimidated the militiamen and the contingent withdrew, leaving the church unguarded. Disarmed and unprotected, the Irish who had stayed in the building were badly beaten as they evacuated it.

The Nativist crowd then descended on St. Philip Neri. Fires were set, holy pictures were slashed, and other holy objects were desecrated. After some of the rioters had moved into the church, the city militia began to try and clear them from nearby Queen Street. But the passions of the crowd had been pushed to uncontrollable heights. The mob of rioters fought back, shooting at the militiamen with three cannon taken from a ship at the nearby docks. The fighting ended around midnight after General Cadwalader's militia again moved in to quell the violence.

In two separate bouts of rioting in May and July, nearly two dozen Philadelphians, both Protestant and Catholic, were killed, and many more were injured.

Bishop Kenrick hoped that the civil authorities would restore calm and order and that the rioters would be punished, but within days, a grand jury had blamed the rioting on the Irish. Adding insult to injury, the grand jury contended that the outbreak of violence was due to “the efforts of a portion of the community to exclude the Bible from public schools.”

The non-Irish, non-Catholic juries acquitted Nativists and convicted Catholics.

Anti-Catholicism had a long and painful history in America, but the seeds of this deadly local conflict had been planted as recently as 1842, when Bishop Kenrick wrote a letter to the board of controllers of public schools, asking that Catholic children be allowed to read from the Douay version of the Bible, a translation widely used by Catholic churches, and also that they be excused from other religious teachings, many of which had a distinct anti-Catholic tone, while at school. In most American schools of this time, the day
began with Bible readings, and the only Bible used was the King James Version, the staple of English Protestantism since 1611.

In the months following the first letter to the board of controllers, anti-Catholic groups twisted Kenrick's request into an attack against the Bible and Protestantism. Combined with the growing anti-Catholic press—picture a nineteenth-century version of hateful talk radio and Web sites—that intensified the intolerant mood, the rumors that the Catholic bishop was trying to “take the Bible out of schools” grew into talk of a broader plot against Protestantism. With a struggling economy, which had not fully recovered from the severe economic downturn known as the Panic of 1837, the mood in Philadelphia was dark. Added to the volatile mix of sectarian hatred and financial desperation was the growing division over abolition, a movement in which Philadelphia was emerging as a center. Class, race, and religious differences were fueling anger that completely betrayed the notion of America as a “benevolent empire” of Protestant Christianity.