You may have Pottsville laid in ashes and a thousand barbarities committed.
—Gen. Darius Couch, 1863
On March 3, 1863, Congress approved an unprecedented expansion of federal power with two laws that were to have dire consequences in the anthracite region. The first was the Habeas Corpus Act, which ratified the Lincoln administration’s suspension of the writ the previous summer. It was a necessary precursor to the second measure: the Enlistment Act.
Like the Militia Act of 1862, its predecessor the year before, the Enlistment Act sounded innocent enough. In fact, it authorized a new, federal three-year draft. And like the Militia Act, the fundamentally unfair manner in which it was enforced in the coal region aroused violent opposition. The suspension of habeas corpus left authorities free to deal with that opposition by the harshest means available, including the taking of hostages. The man named by the U.S. provost marshal to enforce the draft in the 10th Congressional District, which included Schuylkill County, was Charlemagne Tower, who was appointed to a similar state post in December 1862.
An attorney, a coal speculator, and a former Schuylkill County district attorney, Tower was a confirmed Republican. As a young man at Harvard, he was a close friend of Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts whose 1856 beating at the hands of Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina foreshadowed the bloody conflict to come. Tower had already served in the war, as commander of an eighty-man militia unit, the Tower Guard, which served for three months and had seen action at Williamsport, Maryland.1
Tower came to the post determined to suppress any repetition of the 1862 draft troubles, when women had thrown hot water at the enrollers. “Nothing but a sufficient military force, vigorously directed to crush opposition, will prevent the re-enacting of last year’s scenes and riots,” he wrote Secretary of War Stanton in May. “I propose, if women or anybody else interfere, to arrest them at once and dispose of them . . . If the opposers become too numerous and threatening for me to arrest them, I shall propose to have martial law declared in this county and the general commanding this department come in with sufficient military force to put down the turbulent.”2
Tower wanted to use federal conscription in 1863 to finish the work Bannan had started the year before, but his plan to treat those who had evaded the militia draft as deserters ran into opposition from the War Department. Thwarted in his plan to specifically target the 1862 draft evaders, Tower switched his focus to immigrants. Citing the high number of foreigners in the region, Tower, like Bannan, stressed the need for a large draft.3 And like Bannan, Tower was deeply suspicious not only of “turbulent miners” in the West Branch, but also of their political leaders in Pottsville.
When the Schuylkill County commissioners ordered the captains of two volunteer companies in Pottsville to return two hundred muskets, Tower wrote to Gov. Curtin that two of the three commissioners and the county sheriff were opposed to the war. “We are left to surmise what connection there may be between this recall of the muskets and a preparation to resist the enrollment and the draft,” he wrote.4
Tower’s fears were fed by reports from those helping him with the draft enrollment. W. K. Jones reported from Tamaqua on June 14 that Irish miners in the village of Newkirk had opened fire when he tried to help J. F. Werner enroll the men there. “The Irish are so leagued as to make it necessary to coerce them,” he wrote. In case Tower wanted to make an example of those who resisted, Jones provided him with four names, including that of Columbus McGee.5 McGee was subsequently drafted—his name appears on an 1865 list of “deserting drafted men” in the 10th District. He was identified as a Molly Maguire years later at trials implicating him in the 1862 Audenried stoning death of the mine boss Frank Langdon.
Based on reports like Jones’s, Tower warned Col. James D. Bomford, the assistant acting provost marshal for Pennsylvania, that opponents of the draft were organized and armed, and meeting twice a week. “I see no method of making these enrollments except to march through the subdistricts with a military force,” he wrote. Tower already had fifty troops, but he asked Bomford for at least two hundred more, along with two pieces of artillery.6
The new commissioner’s zeal was such that his superior, the provost marshal general, felt the need to warn him against going too far. “Vigorous measures are what I urge on you, and for that purpose I have sent you a military force that seems adequate for all the wants that have yet shown themselves,” Col. James B. Fry wrote. “I want you to use it vigorously, but use it to put down opposition, and not create it, and to be sure that all against whom you adopt vigorous measures are clearly in the wrong.”7
Fry’s fears about Tower’s methods were well-justified, for the means by which Tower conducted and enforced the draft ensured he did indeed create opposition to it—several of his deputies had already landed in legal trouble for their high-handed tactics with draft evaders real and imagined.8 Undeterred, Tower decided to simply use payrolls from the mines as a way to get the names he needed—a method he knew would result in flawed lists.
Tower outlined the plan in a June 13 letter that sought the assistance of a Tamaqua man in the enrollment for two wards there: “Quietly get from every coal operator and other large employer in the two wards the names of all the men who work for them, their age, color, birth place, and whether married or not, and former military service, as well as present residency, and hand the lists to you or me . . . Of course, the lists are to be made as nearly as can be right.”9
Conspicuously absent from Tower’s criteria was one crucial consideration—citizenship. Canvassing might have been out of the question in light of the disturbances the year before, but in relying chiefly on mine payrolls, Tower included many immigrants who had not yet been naturalized, and were thus exempt from military service. By making mine officials his assistants in enforcing the draft, he also risked exacerbating the already tense relations between employers and their employees, a danger he fully recognized. “The coal operators . . . would in most cases aid us by giving lists of their men, but if they do this voluntarily, they are in danger of having their breakers burned and machinery destroyed and being themselves killed,” Tower wrote. “If we appear at their office doors with force and demand the lists, they will give them, and furnish additional information to use, such as we need; and those who intend to resist will be overawed.”10
But Tower did not consider the fifty-seven soldiers already posted to Pottsville sufficient for the job. He wanted at least another one hundred men. Any doubt that the collieries linked to Heckscher’s Forest Improvement Company would voluntarily cooperate with the enrollment were laid to rest following a meeting with several company officials who lived in Cass Township. “I have just been assured, this evening, that I shall need to march armed men into at least four sub-districts in Schuylkill County in order to complete the enrollments there,” he wrote.11
The reinforcements Tower wanted arrived on July 3, the day the Battle of Gettysburg ended in a decisive Union victory. Two companies of the Invalid Guard, a unit of wounded veterans unfit for frontline duty, augmented by eighty soldiers from Philadelphia, brought Tower’s total troop strength in Pottsville to nearly three hundred.12
The reinforcements were welcome, for events in July only heightened the coal establishment’s siege mentality. The invasion of Pennsylvania by Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in late June spurred the Miners’ Journal to warn that the Confederates intended to seize Harrisburg, then lay waste to the collieries of the anthracite region.13
And the bloody draft riots that erupted in New York City that July led Tower to worry that a Fifth Column based in the West Branch region would march on Pottsville. Miners stomping out of the townships to ravish the county seat had been a fear dating back to 1842. Tower asked Abraham Ernst, the superintendent of the Phoenix Colliery in Branch Township, to warn of any marches on Pottsville from the hostiles of his neighborhood.
The New York riots had an even more immediate impact, for the government transferred nearly half the troops in Schuylkill County to Philadelphia, fearing a similar outbreak there. Tower complained to Fry on July 18 that he was losing 137 soldiers: “I have here now only the two companies of the Invalid Corps in charge of Maj. Dayton. I think it is my duty to say this force is far from adequate. The miners at several collieries in Schuylkill county have already stopped work and are drilling everyday, preparatory to resistance or some hostile movement. They are within four to eight miles from this town [Pottsville], and I have been told, by men whom I can believe, of threats . . . that they will march in and burn up the town.”
He added that Supt. Wilder of the Mine Hill and Schuylkill Haven Railroad Company, who helped mediate the May 1862 strike, had assured him “that there is a complete organization, embracing Schuylkill, Luzerne and Carbon counties” of ten thousand well-armed men who were prepared to assemble with twelve hours notice to resist the draft. Tower asked for “at least 2,000 men and two batteries of mountain howitzers” and said he wanted preparations made to declare martial law.14 In response, Bomford ordered Tower to go slow and to avoid any trouble until the draft was completed in Philadelphia and reinforcements could be sent.15
Tower’s concerns were passed up the line, duly embroidered. Gen. William D. Whipple in Philadelphia reported to Fry on July 23 that in Cass Township alone, up to three thousand armed men were being drilled nightly by discharged militiamen, and that the rebels had two artillery pieces and were threatening to burn the homes and coal breakers of Republicans.16
Veterans were returning home, but the real problem was far different from the one Whipple outlined. The militiamen called up for service in 1862 were due to be mustered out, and Gen. Darius Couch, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of the Susquehanna, feared the impact of their loss on the coal fields. Infected with Tower’s paranoia, Couch wrote Gov. Curtin a furious note about his decision not to extend the militia’s term of service: “Order off these, you may have Pottsville laid in ashes and a thousand barbarities committed.”17
Soon, a curious newspaper story emerged that pegged the number of organized draft resisters around Pottsville at well above the ten thousand previously reported. The Guardian of Paterson, New Jersey, reported that a “United States officer of high rank” had perambulated the area disguised as a Catholic priest. By hearing confessions he had supposedly determined the insurgents’ true strength: fifteen thousand Mollies organized into companies and battalions, drilled by old soldiers and armed with seven hundred Springfield rifles. The name of this intrepid officer was not divulged, but the article did say he made a “tolerably accurate” enrollment by seizing the payrolls of the collieries. Tower had done exactly that, shortly before the article appeared.18
While Couch and the press waxed hysterical on the supposed strength of the forces arrayed against conscription, Tower proved just how unfounded those fears were by preparing a military operation in the West Branch with the troops he had. He had been “astonished with his success” in carrying through the enrollment elsewhere in the county in July, but he wasn’t about to take any chances in the militant Irish strongholds of Cass and Reilly Townships. He moved into Heckscherville and Thomaston on August 10 with eight companies of infantry and sixty cavalrymen under Gen. Whipple. The results, after a year of warnings about organized resistance there, were more anticlimactic than apocalyptic. “A large body of men was present at the beginning and they were cross and very saucy even in the presence of the military, but they were too much afraid to use violence,” Tower reported. “The enrolling officer succeeded in enrolling two hundred names at the two collieries of Heckscherville and Thomaston. The crowd dispersed after a while, so that he could not get all the names, some of the dwelling houses were shut up entirely, and the women in them would not answer any questions at all.”
But Cass hadn’t gone entirely quiescent. At dusk that evening, a sergeant of the 45th Pa. Militia made the mistake of riding alone near Coal Castle, where men in Union blue had to watch their step. He was promptly jumped by four or five men and robbed of his revolver, sword, and money.19
Forestville was the troops’ next target. After running into the same problems they faced in Heckscherville, the soldiers simply detained the clerks of four collieries and brought them to Pottsville, along with the pay-books for the mines. That accomplished, their commanding officer decided to wrap up a loose end: “On the way home, in the neighborhood where the quartermaster sergeant was knocked from his horse and robbed, the military, by order of Genl. Whipple, arrested and brought in seven men to be held until the guilty parties and the sword, revolver and money taken . . . are brought forth, and as hostages for the good behavior of the vicinage, hereafter. These men were yesterday sent down by Genl. Whipple and lodged in Fort Mifflin.”20
The seizure of hostages was common enough on both sides in the war, but Whipple’s action, if not strictly illegal, was certainly a new departure. Most hostages taken by the Union Army came from the South or border states with Southern sympathies—and they were supposed to be held “as a pledge for the fulfillment of an agreement concluded between belligerents,” according to the U.S. War Department’s General Order No. 100, which was published in April 1863, just months before.
The seven Cass hostages were Northern civilians, seized purely as a retaliatory measure, and they had no recourse to civil proceedings, for Congress had suspended habeas corpus.21 Thus they were confined to the dank recesses of Fort Mifflin, a notorious prisoner of war camp just south of Philadelphia, in the marshes where the Schuylkill flows into the Delaware.
The case outraged Democrats. One Harrisburg newspaper thundered that it trampled on “the dearest and most important guaranties of the liberties of the citizen,” pointed out all of the detainees should be presumed innocent, and reminded readers that five of the men were fathers. It’s unclear when the seven—James Walsh, Arthur O’Neal,* Matthew Mealy, John M. Brennan, Arthur Hunt, John Ball, and John Brennan—were released, or if the stolen items were ever returned. What was clear, the newspaper said, was that the “illegal and false imprisonment” of the men risked turning rebel sympathizers into outright rebels.22
Whatever its long-term effects, in the short term the government’s use of overwhelming military force and the suspension of civil law ensured not just completion of the draft enrollment, but a more compliant and productive work force in the mines. Just to be sure that his superiors didn’t miss the connection, Tower wrote on August 20 that the presence of the military had “soothed the rebellious greatly and not only prevented their making any hostile demonstrations, but even moved them to do more work, and more quietly.”
“The rebellious” had been so soothed, in fact, that on August 22, a delegation from Reilly Township met with Tower and Joseph Heisler, his deputy in the West Branch, to correct the enrollment for their township. The provost marshal’s use of mine payrolls had left plenty of room for error.
The completion of the enrollment allowed the army to finally remove some of the state militia, now that it was clear that Pottsville would not be “laid in ashes.” In fact, when the 47th Pa. Militia Regiment, which had been dragooning the West Branch, was pulled out of Minersville on August 22, the only eruption reported was one of “great rejoicing and drinking” in Cass Township.23
The ten thousand well-armed men supposedly organized to oppose the draft in the anthracite region were nowhere to be seen. It may be that Tower’s fears were, quite literally, fantastical, and that those parading around posed no more of a military threat than did the mummers of the “Santa Anna guard” who marched in Pottsville in 1855. Indeed, the exaggerated reports of ten thousand wild Irish coal miners wreaking havoc in Schuylkill County would, by war’s end, become fodder for outright mockery.
With the enrollment completed, the actual drafting of names took place with no trouble. Tower reported that it had been completed on September 23, “attended by good order throughout.”24 What protests there were against Tower’s conduct of the draft came through official channels. Meyer Strouse, the Democratic congressman for Schuylkill County, wrote to President Lincoln on September 19 to complain of “gross errors in the enrollment of a number of the districts in the coal region, which if not rectified, may lead to great and serious dissatisfaction.”
He pointed out that in the Democratic West Branch townships, the number of men enrolled for the draft invariably exceeded the number of voters in the 1862 election, while in Republican Pottsville, the number of men enrolled for the draft was actually less than the number who had voted the year before. In Cass, 828 men were enrolled, while only 640 had voted; in Reilly Township, the ratio was 532 to 278; but in Pottsville, only 1,022 men were enrolled while 1,475 had voted.
Tower dismissed Strouse’s objections in a letter that reveals much about his conduct of the draft: “His statement as to the apparent inconsistencies and inequalities in the enrollment may or may not be true—It is certainly not worthwhile.” Tower felt he was justified, for political and economic reasons, in drafting those specifically exempt from conscription:
After the breaking out of the rebellion, the coal business revived and many more than the usual number of miners were required. This brought a rush of aliens from foreign lands. The mining districts, where not one man in 20 can read and or write, are the “Democratic districts” as Strouse calls them. These men, in those districts, were instructed by their Democratic leaders, in county meetings, and other places, not to go to the war, but to stay at home, go to the election and vote “and put down this infernal abolition government—this infernal abolition administration.” In making the enrollment, of course, as many of these newly arrived aliens as could be got hold of were enrolled, although not entitled to vote until they were here for five years.25
If they were not entitled to vote, they were not subject to conscription, but Tower insisted on drafting “as many . . . as could be got hold of” for purely political reasons. Bannan had drafted Democrats in Cass Township. Now Tower was drafting potential Democrats—Irish miners who not yet been naturalized, and thus remained British subjects.
His disregard for the question of citizenship drew protest from the British consul in Philadelphia, who complained that it was all but impossible for Her Majesty’s subjects to claim exemption from the draft, “especially in the mining and manufacturing districts”: “The universal statement of all applicants to this Office for Consular Certificates is that the Provost Marshal of their districts throw every possible difficulty in the way of making good their claim as aliens.”
In response, Tower made clear just what was meant by “every possible difficulty.” The provost marshal told Gilbert, the assistant acting provost marshal for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, that he required all those seeking alien exemption to file an affidavit. It had to be signed by two “reputable citizens” and state that the individual was an alien, and of what government he claimed to be a subject; when he had arrived in the United States, and where he had resided; that he had never declared an intention to become a U.S. citizen, and had never voted. But even that wasn’t enough for Tower: he also insisted on a personal interrogation of both the applicant and the “reputable citizens” who had signed the petition. Last, but by no means least, he insisted on proof from a court that the individual had never taken out citizenship papers: “After ascertaining in this way all the applicants’ places of residence during the period he has been in this country, I then require him also to procure and file with me certificates from the several courts within whose jurisdictions he had resided, that he had not while there taken out his final papers or declared his intention to become a citizen. In the case of men whose father might have naturalized him by becoming a citizen when he was underage, I require similar certificates, in regard to the father, also.”
Given the frequency with which many immigrants moved, this last requirement made it all but impossible to obtain an exemption. And as to the consular certificates that proved a holder was a foreign national, Tower recommended that they be ignored completely, because they were based on mere affidavits.26
The result was predictable—his enrollment list was riddled with mistakes, as Tower freely admitted. But he didn’t consider it a problem. “There are some errors in them, no doubt, and a good many aliens embraced, particularly in Schuylkill County,” he wrote. “To amend the lists by scanning the claims of alienage would require, if thoroughly done, at least three months. I would submit that a better way is, to make the draft and exempt the aliens and others in this district as we are now exempting them at the daily hearings.”
Despite his web of red tape, a few aliens, it seems, were still eluding the dragnet of the draft by proving they were aliens. And though a few slipped through the seine, Tower had a plan to ensure the net effect would be the same. “Order a little larger ration [of the draft], from this district, on that account ESPECIALLY FROM SCHUYLKILL COUNTY; then about the same result will be obtained as if the lists were previously corrected,” he wrote in early December. Like Bannan, Tower placed the burden of conscription firmly on the shoulders on the mining regions where Democrats held sway.
That doubtless contributed to the opposition that finally erupted in several mining townships when it came time to serve the draft notices. Tower reported on October 19 that officers serving draft notices in Blythe Township northeast of Pottsville had been driven off by a mob. He wanted seventy-five cavalrymen to deal with the problem.27
On October 26 there was trouble in Blythe and Schuylkill Townships. Disturbances were also reported in the West Branch, where “it has been found impossible to serve the notices on the drafted men in Reilly Township,” Tower reported.28 The ongoing trouble was a far cry from the sort of insurrection that Gen. Couch had feared would “lay Pottsville in ashes.” Mostly what it involved was dragging unwilling men from their homes in a draft from which many should have been exempt.
Even half a century after the war, the dragooning of Schuylkill County was still fresh in the minds of those who lived through it as children. “I can vividly recall when the Government called for men to join the Union Army,” wrote Philip Francis, who was a boy in the East Delaware patch just north of Pottsville during the war. “Some men would hide from the Government officers sent to bring them. I have seen them run through the fields and woods with officers after them. There was no let up until they were caught; then they must go to the front.”29
In the face of overwhelming military force, there was little that residents of the West Branch could do in 1863 but bide their time. The dispatch of troops to trouble spots may have kept the lid on antidraft disturbances, but it had by no means ended labor unrest in the West Branch. That quickly became evident to Henry Hawthorne Dunne, an Irish Protestant from Waterford who on October 1 took over a Heckscherville colliery linked to the Forest Improvement Company. When Dunne tried to dock the wages of some miners for sending out dirt instead of coal, he was confronted by committeemen who threatened to run him off the place. Dunne had to yield “to prevent destruction of his property.” A short time later, the committee forced him to rehire two mule drivers who had been fired for bad conduct.30
It was not long before Dunne, Tower, the Heckschers, and the rest of the coal establishment concluded that the troops sent to the anthracite region to enforce the draft could perform an even more important task—the destruction of those troublesome labor committees. The job had already begun in neighboring Carbon County.