“THE BOY WHO COMMANDS THAT
PRETTY LOT RECRUITED THEM FOR THE SECESHES”
IN MID-DECEMBER 1860, as South Carolina prepared to secede from the Union, a strange advertisement appeared in the New York Herald:
The captains of all the Volunteer [militia] Companies of the City of New-York [are requested] to send a communication to the undersigned, at No. 74 Mott-st., stating the name of the Company and the number of men under their command, for the purpose of perfecting a Military Organization to protect the municipal rights of the city and the constitutional rights of the citizens of the country, in the event of a revolution.
For the few New Yorkers who did not understand the code words, the Herald offered a translation. One object of the proposed corps, it explained, was to protect the city “from further republican encroachments” such as the Metropolitan Police Act of 1857. The reference to “constitutional rights” indicated that the organization “will be pro-slavery in principle, and will take prompt action in case of secession.” In other words, the ad was a call for New York militia units to fight for the Confederacy should the country descend into Civil War. The ad was signed by the city’s best known Bowery Boy, Five Pointer James E. Kerrigan.1
Kerrigan’s story reflects the competing loyalties tugging at many New York Democrats during the War Between the States. He had laid relatively low since helping to incite the bloody Bowery Boy Riot in 1857, drawing a salary as a police court clerk while undoubtedly devoting most of his energy to gambling, fighting, and politicking with his fellow sporting men. He reemerged in the fall of 1860, however, running for Congress as the candidate of “Mozart Hall,” the organization created by Mayor Fernando Wood as an alternative to Tammany. Discussing Kerrigan’s qualifications for office, the Herald noted that his chief talent was as “a strong man to head crowds at political meetings. . . . If he should happen to be elected and there should be a disposition in the American Congress to break the thing up in a row, Councilman Kerrigan may be relied upon to do yeoman service in the cause of his country.”2
Though the thirty-one-year-old might lack the résumé of the typical congressional candidate, his appearance and bearing were bound to impress Five Points voters. “He is tall, slim and graceful, though possessed, it is said, of a remarkable physical strength,” commented the Herald on the eve of the election. “His face is long, thin and pale, free from mustache or beard, except [for] a delicate imperial, copied from the style of the old masters.” Kerrigan’s long, jet-black hair curled about his shoulders, but he was not burly like many of his fellow sporting men. “He has more the appearance, in gentility and grace, of one of Mr. Brown’s dancing young men, than of the warlike and indomitable hero which he is known to be,” observed the same reporter. “A gleam, which shoots out of his light, cold gray eyes, however, indicates the spirit which is within.”3
Kerrigan entered the congressional contest at a distinct disadvantage. The Tammany nominee could rely on his organization’s vast network of district leaders and ward heelers to assist him in his bid for office. Kerrigan, in contrast, had no such machine. But the demographics of the congressional district—comprising the Fourth, Sixth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Wards—must have encouraged him. According to the Herald, the constituency had “more of the active element of young America in it than any other, and, necessarily, Kerrigan is the leader and chief.” Sure enough, Kerrigan pulled off the upset, one of several Mozart congressional victories that year.4
After the election, as the South began preparations for secession, New York swirled with rumors of conspiracy and intrigue. An attack by saboteurs on the Brooklyn Navy Yard was said to be imminent. Ships were said to be sailing from New York wharves laden with weapons and ammunition for the Confederacy. Given the city’s overwhelming Democratic majority and close economic ties to the South, speculation that New York City might secede from the Republican North and join the Confederacy did not seem far-fetched. Kerrigan’s advertisement in the Herald was thus especially provocative.5
Some New Yorkers did not take Kerrigan’s announcement seriously, calling it another of his self-aggrandizing attempts to attract public attention. The Tribune interpreted it as a political gesture designed to draw recruits to a new Democratic political organization that would be independent of both Tammany and Mozart Halls. Nonetheless, rumors persisted throughout the winter of 1860–61 that Kerrigan’s followers would join the Confederate ranks or attack the Navy Yard. He was even called before a grand jury to explain his intentions. After South Carolinians launched the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, northern opinion—even in New York—swung decisively against the South. If he had ever seriously entertained thoughts of fighting for the Confederacy, Kerrigan now abandoned them, and began seeking a command in the Union ranks. Although he lacked West Point training, he was able to parlay his political clout and his experience in Mexico and Nicaragua into a colonel’s commission in May 1861. In early July, his unit of 777 soldiers, designated the Twenty-fifth Regiment of New York Infantry, left the city to join the forces defending Washington.6
As long as it remained under Kerrigan’s command, the Twenty-fifth never fully reconciled itself to war with the South. When the troops assigned to the defense of the capital marched in review for Lincoln and General George B. McClellan on August 26, 1861, Kerrigan’s unit refused to give a cheer for the president and the Union. A soldier from another command explained the regiment’s attitude to the English journalist William H. Russell, telling him that “the boy who commands that pretty lot recruited them for the Seceshes in New York, but finding he could not get them away he handed them over to Uncle Sam.” The unit’s lack of enthusiasm for the war effort also manifested itself in the recruits’ appearance. Russell described Kerrigan’s soldiers as “miserable scarecrows in rags and tatters.”7
Despite warnings that such embarrassing displays would not be tolerated in the future, Kerrigan and his men continued to treat their superiors with disdain while stationed in Arlington, Virginia. When Kerrigan’s commanding officer, Brigadier General John H. Martindale, came to review the regiment in mid-October, he found the soldiers untrained, unkempt, and uncooperative. Martindale upbraided Kerrigan, but the colonel refused to listen and stomped away. He ignored a subsequent order to return for an additional inspection the next day, so Martindale had the Bowery Boy arrested. The charges against him included “habitual neglect of duty” for failing to train his men; “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline” for allowing the soldiers to “engage in loud and unseemly disputes and brawls,” to appear at inspection “in a dirty and slovenly condition, with their pants partially unbuttoned in front,” and to keep their weapons and gear “in great filth and disorder”; leaving the inspection without permission; disobeying the order to return for the subsequent inspection; leaving camp at night without permission of his superior officer; “drunkenness on duty”; and “communicating with the enemy” while drinking at a roadhouse called Bailey’s Cross Roads.
Kerrigan admitted leaving his post without permission but pleaded not guilty to the other charges. He also spared no expense in assembling a defense team, hiring Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a former U.S. Attorney General, as his counsel. Johnson convinced the court-martial tribunal to acquit his client of the final two charges, but it found him guilty of the others. Kerrigan could have been sentenced to a long prison term, but was instead merely mustered out of the army on February 21, 1862. He remained in Washington to complete his term in the House of Representatives, but as the Herald had predicted, the style of politics practiced in the Capitol did not suit Kerrigan’s talents. He was arrested on the House floor when he repeatedly tried, after the time for debate had ended, to speak against a bill that would fund the abolition of slavery in Missouri. He never held elective office again.8
After the war, Kerrigan found other outlets for what the Times described as his “dare-devil” impulses. When word reached New York in June 1866 that several hundred Irish freedom fighters known as the Fenians had attacked Canada as revenge for the continuing British occupation of Ireland, “General” Kerrigan announced that he would raise a brigade of five thousand soldiers to assist in the assault. By this point, however, the invasion had been repulsed, and Kerrigan never made it to Canada.9
Kerrigan could not have been deeply involved with the Fenians before their attack on Canada, otherwise he would have been with them at the border, rather than in New York City, when they crossed into Ontario and Québec. But in 1867 Kerrigan did become a central figure in an even more daring Fenian military operation: an attempt to invade Ireland itself to spark an uprising against the British. On April 13, the Jacmel Packet left New York Harbor carrying “Brigadier General Kerrigan” and his force of thirty-eight Irish freedom fighters. Once at sea, they patriotically rechristened the vessel Erin’s Hope. Despite the small size of its invasion force, the group believed it could succeed because the ship’s arrival in Sligo Harbor would coincide with an uprising by indigenous revolutionaries, who could make use of the five hundred rifles the Americans brought with them. On the evening of May 23, the crew sighted the Sligo coastline, but remained safely in the bay while awaiting the sign to attack.
The signal never came. Apparently fearing that informants would compromise their plans, the Sligo Fenians had launched their uprising two months early, before Kerrigan and his men had even left New York. The revolt was a dismal failure, as the British quickly rounded up and imprisoned the leaders. At their contact’s suggestion, the Americans sailed southward, hoping to return when their Irish allies had regrouped. But the ship soon began running low on supplies. Some on board insisted that they had come too far not to strike a blow at the British, even a futile one. A majority, however, demanded they set sail back to New York. A couple of daring souls did go ashore in Sligo with their cache of weapons, but authorities quickly arrested them. Kerrigan returned with the bulk of the force to New York.10
Given Kerrigan’s Irish roots, one would imagine that he had risked his life on the Erin’s Hope out of dedication to the Irish cause. But he seemed willing to take adventure wherever he could find it. In 1870, the lifelong Democrat served as a mercenary of sorts for the South Carolina Republican party. Looking for a way to counterbalance the terror tactics of the Ku Klux Klan that prevented both black and white Republicans from voting, South Carolina’s Republican governor, Robert K. Scott, brought in Kerrigan and a band of his New York rowdies to fight back. After all, no one was more experienced than Kerrigan in the use of violence and intimidation at the polls. Whether or not Kerrigan actually came to blows with the Klan during his months in South Carolina is not known.11
How Kerrigan supported himself in these years is a mystery. He probably filled his days with the usual sporting men’s pursuits, but he was no longer a significant player in city politics. Always the adventurer, he observed many battles during the Franco-Prussian War and toured Turkey in the mid-1880s as well. Later, he moved to Brooklyn. Even in his seventies, Kerrigan could not resist an exciting opportunity, traveling with another old-time Five Pointer to the Yukon Territory “as representative of a syndicate.” Kerrigan fell ill during the trip and had to have surgery upon his return. Tough to the end, he supposedly “refused to take an anaesthetic and never uttered a moan while the surgeons were at work.” He died a few weeks later, on November 1, 1899.12