CHAPTER 20
Immigrants Join the Fight
Ye come from many a far off clime,
And speak in many a tongue
But Freedom’s song will reach the heart
In whatever language sung.
—“Garibaldi War Song”
About one-fourth of the men who fought for the Union during the war were foreign-born immigrants. New York’s immigrant communities responded to Lincoln’s call for volunteers in such numbers that even Bennett’s Herald was impressed. Many of them were used to marching around and firing muskets. Because the nativists had banned immigrants from most of the local militia, they had formed their own German, Irish, Italian, Scots, and French volunteer militias. Factories, shipyards, shops, and volunteer fire companies all had them. Determined to prove their superiority to the nativists’ militia by actually learning how to shoot their rifles with accuracy, they were called “target companies.” Their interest in riflery and marksmanship would help to inspire the founding of the National Rifle Association in New York City in 1871.
In 1861 there were more than a hundred target companies in the city, with names like the Washington Market Chowder Guard, the Peanut Guard, the Mustache Fusileers, Sweet’s Epicurean Guard, Tompkins’ Butcher Association Guard, and, perhaps inevitably, Nobody’s Guard. On Sundays, the workingman’s one day off, as well as on Christmas and Thanksgiving, they marched through the streets to the racket of fife and drum, rifles shouldered, wearing gaily colorful uniforms hand-stitched by wives and girlfriends. A target bearer, preferably a black man of imposing size, led the column, holding the large wooden target aloft. This was sometimes an impressive sight itself, carved as an eagle or stag, streaming ribbons. Some Sundays you’d see ten or more companies marching up Broadway; on holidays it might be more than one hundred, comprising as many as ten thousand marchers. Citizens along the parade routes considered them an awful nuisance. On his visit to the city Dickens noted, “These incessant street processions allow no omnibus, van, or barouche to break the ranks, leaving Broadway traffic benumbed.” (A barouche was an open, private carriage.) They’d proceed up to Jones’s Wood on the Upper East Side, a popular picnic spot that was once considered for the site of what became Central Park, or take a ferry over to open land on Staten Island or in New Jersey. There they’d spend the afternoon in target-shooting competitions, called “schützenfests” by the Germans, with much attendant drinking, picnicking, and bellowing of songs from the Old Country. By the time they “marched” home on Sunday evening the day’s carousing had significantly loosened discipline, and citizens complained of hooliganism, vandalism, and general loutishness.
New York City fielded more German units than any other city in the Union. They grabbed the chance to show that they were just as good and patriotic as any Know-Nothing. As it turned out, they would face as much anti-Dutch prejudice in the military as they had in civilian life, but they didn’t know that yet. While German workers feared Negro competitors as much as the Irish did, abolitionism ran high among the progressive Forty-Eighters. They declared the end of slavery a goal of the war from the start—almost two years before Lincoln did. A large percentage of the white officers who commanded the United States Colored Troops would be German immigrants.
One of the best known of the city’s German regiments, and destined to be the most ill-starred, was the 8th New York Infantry, a.k.a. the 1st German Rifles. A pair of Forty-Eighters, Louis (Ludwig) Blenker and Julius Stahel, organized it. A German-speaking Hungarian who fled after the failed revolt against Austria, Stahel arrived in New York City in 1859 and was editing a weekly German-language newspaper when the war broke out. Blenker, originally Hessian, also fled to New York after 1848, and by 1861 he was a prosperous businessman living at the upscale Prescott House, a hotel across Broadway from the St. Nicholas at Spring Street. Blenker was the regiment’s colonel, Stahel his lieutenant colonel. The regiment camped at Terrace Garden, a German pleasure garden way uptown on East 58th Street. The German community funded them to the hilt: two sets of spiffy uniforms for Blenker’s one thousand men and officers, artillery, and a fully equipped ambulance unit. Blenker rode at their head on a magnificent steed, wearing a crimson-lined cape and making regal gestures that some observers found grand and others ludicrous. When the 8th reached Washington, the lavish table he set made “an invitation to the camp of the ‘First German Rifles’ a top priority of wartime Washington’s social elite.” Three more regiments were added to the 8th, forming an all-German brigade.
Leopold von Gilsa, a Prussian army veteran, raised the all-German De Kalb Regiment, officially the 41st New York Volunteer Infantry. The UDC provided the funds to equip it. Von Gilsa had come to New York City in the early 1850s and made his living singing and playing piano in the German beer gardens on the Bowery. On the battlefield Colonel von Gilsa would be known for flying into rages at his men and fellow officers and screaming horrible curses at them in German. An American officer who bore the brunt of one of these inexplicable tirades reported that he believed von Gilsa had gone insane.
Meanwhile, New York’s Irish leaders mulled over how to respond to Lincoln’s call. Most of them were Democrats and had been pro-South, antiabolition, and anti-Lincoln. Few Irishmen in the city had any interest in going to war on behalf of black slaves; beyond that, forcing the secessionist states back into the Union ran counter to their long-nurtured ideals of freedom. The Irish-American editorialized, “We deprecate the idea of Irish-Americans—who have themselves suffered so much for opinion’s sake not only at home but here even—volunteering to coerce those with whom they have no direct connection.”
But the firing on Fort Sumter got their blood up. Archbishop Hughes, no fan of Lincoln or blacks, decided that fighting for their adopted country presented his Irish Catholic flock an opportunity to silence their Know-Nothing detractors. The leaders of the Fenian Brotherhood were of two minds about the war. Combat would give their fighters experience they could later put to good use against the British, but inevitably it would also thin their ranks, even in the short and glorious war everyone expected.
New York Irishmen were also compelled to volunteer by a simple expedient. Employment, which was never high among poor Irish workers, plummeted with the economic downturn caused by secession. It was estimated at the time that unemployment among Irish males in 1861 was 25 percent higher even than in the wake of the Panic of 1857. Signing up for the army meant a job, even if it was only for three months, and a regular pay packet, even if the pay was low.
In all, nearly 150,000 Irishmen would fight for the Union, a third of them from in and around New York City. They largely volunteered in the early stages of the war; by the fall of 1862, after Irish troops had been massacred in several savage battles, convincing new ones to sign up would be much harder.
The first Irish regiment to leave New York City for the war was the 69th New York Volunteers, who would come to be revered as the Fighting 69th. At their head was Colonel Michael Corcoran. Born in Sligo in 1827, he’d been a private in the Crown’s Revenue Police, a military unit that enforced the laws against the private distilling of liquor. Meanwhile he was also a member of the Ribbon Society, a secret independence organization and precursor to the IRA, identified by green ribbons in their lapels. Because of the latter he was compelled to flee to America in 1849. In New York he found work keeping the books for the Hibernian House, a tavern on Prince Street across from the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In 1851 he joined the militia company that became the 69th. His time in the Revenue Police made him one of the few men with any military background, and he rose to the rank of colonel. He also joined Tammany, where he got out the vote in the Fourteenth Ward and was rewarded with a nice desk job in the post office. In 1859 he was reputedly the first naturalized Irish American citizen to sign up with O’Mahony’s Fenian Brotherhood. When Lincoln put out his call for volunteers, Corcoran and his aide Lieutenant Colonel Robert Nugent, also a Fenian, headed up the 69th New York. It’s believed that most of the men of the regiment were from the Brotherhood. At first, not all New Yorkers were convinced of the Irishmen’s patriotism; a rumor flashed around the city that the 69th was heading south to join the Confederate army.
Thomas Francis Meagher heard the call as well. Like Sickles, he didn’t let his complete lack of military experience hold him back. He ran an ad in the Tribune calling for one hundred Irish volunteers for a company of his own, which would join the 69th as soon as possible.
Father Thomas Mooney, pastor of the Catholic Church of St. Brigid on Avenue B in today’s East Village (known as the Famine Church, as it was built in the late 1840s by Famine Irish workers), joined the 69th as its chaplain. John McSorley, a County Tyrone man who had opened his famous alehouse on East 7th Street in 1854, marched with the 69th. So did the journalist and satirist Charles G. Halpine, a Fenian who came to New York City in the early 1850s, got involved in Tammany, and was soon contributing to the major dailies. While serving as an officer through much of the war, Halpine continued to write. He created an alter ego, Private Miles O’Reilly, who would send many joking dispatches to the Herald.
In the Sunday Mercury, Orpheus C. Kerr signed up with a satirical version of the 69th, the “Mackerel Brigade.” The fictitious brigade’s name referred to the area around St. Brigid’s and Tompkins Square Park that was called Mackerelville because its tenements were stuffed to bursting with Irish Catholics who ate fish on Fridays, and were thus “mackerel-snappers.”
On April 23 the 69th Regiment, more than one thousand Irishmen strong, formed ranks on Great Jones Street just off Broadway in today’s NoHo. The next day’s Times reported that “the whole City turned out to bid them Godspeed.” Corcoran cut a gallant figure. Tall, trim, his face youthfully smooth under a neat beard and mustache, he wore a uniform that dazzled with gold epaulettes and a large badge featuring the regimental insignia, an Irish harp. Maria Daly presented the regiment with a silk American flag, and the Judge Daly Guards marched with them. Captain D. P. Conyngham, a journalist, remembered, “The regiment moved into Broadway amid deafening cheers; flags and banners streamed from the windows and house-tops; ladies waved their handkerchiefs from the balconies, and flung bouquets on the marching column.”
“About 5 o’clock the regiment reached Pier No. 4, North River,” the Times reported. “Here a most interesting spectacle was exhibited. In every direction people had clambered into the rigging of the vessels; they covered the tops of the pier-sheds and houses, and every place where a view could be obtained.” They also thronged the pier in such a crush that soldiers had to fight their way to the waiting steamboat, some losing their rifles and other equipment in the tumult.
The 69th reached Washington and was ordered to set up camp on Arlington Heights, across the river from Georgetown. The men named it Fort Corcoran. Maria Daly recorded with alarm that the judge went down to Washington to visit with them, and even stood guard one night with a pistol. “It seems as if my heart strings tighten whenever I hear him speak of the war. I know he would like the excitement of it. I thought him more of a philosopher.”
Meanwhile it took only a week for Meagher to recruit his company. He hastily drilled them at the Ancient Order of Hibernians’ ramshackle hall on Prince Street and at an Irish billiard saloon at Broadway and West 10th Street. Meagher’s company reached Washington in late May. Henry Villard, who had a low opinion of the Irish in general and Meagher in particular, observed testily that Meagher “had devised a most extraordinary uniform for himself… literally covered with gold lace. It was a sight to see him strut along Pennsylvania Avenue in it, with the airs of a conquering hero.” Meagher came to Washington a captain and was field-promoted to major as he folded his company into the 69th. Also joining the 69th at Fort Corcoran were the 5th New York Volunteers, organized by Colonel Abram Duryee, a Manhattan native and wealthy mahogany importer who’d previously marched with the 7th Regiment and been wounded during the Astor Place Riot.
The 69th was still at Fort Corcoran when Chaplain Mooney got in trouble with Archbishop Hughes. Catholic leaders had decided that it was fine for the Irish to fight for their country, but to act like bloodthirsty savages about it wouldn’t do their image any good. That went double for their chaplains. Mooney went too far when he blessed one of the fort’s cannons and reportedly preached that his troops should “flail” the enemy, and Hughes recalled him to New York.
Since the city’s Italian population was still small, an initial attempt to raise an Italian regiment to be called the Garibaldi Guard—honoring the world-traveling revolutionary who had lived briefly on Staten Island in the 1850s—succeeded only in prompting the ever sensitive Herald to note that it would deprive the city of its organ grinders. Then a mysterious figure calling himself Count Frederick George D’Utassy popped up and pasted together a Garibaldi Guard that was a multinational crazy quilt of ten companies—three German, three Hungarian, plus an Italian, a French, a Swiss, and a Spanish company. General George McClellan later joked that he wouldn’t have been surprised to find “Esquimaux or Chinese” among them. They became the 39th New York Infantry, with D’Utassy their colonel.
“Like the talking dog,” William L. Burton wrote in Melting Pot Soldiers, “the remarkable thing about the regiment was not that it worked poorly, but that it worked at all.” The officers spoke and wrote in six different languages. They marched behind three different regimental flags, to the tunes of “La Marseillaise” and “Yankee Doodle” played by a corps of forty buglers. Their comic-opera uniforms mixed Chasseur jackets, balloon pantaloons, and cocked hats with large feathers.
Everyone agreed that D’Utassy at least looked like a splendid commander. He was small of stature but made up for it with his fine military bearing and a Napoleonic flair for gesture. He claimed to be a Hungarian nobleman who had served in the Austrian army, then fought against Austria when Hungary revolted in 1848. Fleeing an Austrian death sentence, he said, he trained cavalry in Turkey, then went to England, whence he was sent to Canada as a secretary to the governor of Nova Scotia. From there he came to New York City in 1860. His romantic story and noble pedigree made it easy for him to raise funding for his regiment from the UDC.
The Garibaldi Guard reached Washington at the end of May. D’Utassy continued to put on airs, an aloof and lax commander more interested in living sumptuously in his tent and lobbying for a generalship than in training his mostly lowborn immigrant troops. There were problems with their pay and with their muskets. Bored, some of them wandered out of camp and got arrested in drunken brawls. Some others deserted. Ancient animosities among the various nationalities created feuds, and the officers had multilingual spats with one another. Some resigned. As morale plummeted, seven of the ten companies called for D’Utassy to resign. One Hungarian officer who quarreled with D’Utassy led his company in open mutiny. They marched from their camp near Alexandria into Washington, where the army rounded them up and imprisoned them.
To try to establish some order, the army folded D’Utassy’s Garibaldis into Blenker’s German brigade. Each man held himself in the highest regard and the other in the lowest, and both were prone to pomposity. Inevitably, they were soon engaged in their own private Austro-Hungarian war. Their problems were far from over.