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THE FALL OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC.

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1886.

_Copyright_, 1885, BY ROBERTS BROTHERS.

University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.

THE FALL OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC. (1886–88.)

BY SIR HENRY STANDISH COVERDALE (_Intendant for the Board of European Administration in the Province of New York._)

“O Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!”

_By Permission of the Bureau of Press Censorship._

NEW YORK: 1895.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. INTRODUCTORY.--THE “HARD TIMES” OF 1882–1887 7

II. THE MORAL INTERREGNUM 15

III. THE SOCIALISTIC POISON 27

IV. THE RULE OF IRELAND IN AMERICA 32

V. THE FIRST ERUPTION 51

VI. ANXIOUS FOREBODINGS 77

VII. THE REVOLUTIONISTS’ MASTER-STROKE 86

VIII. THE REIGN OF ANARCHY 96

IX. ATTEMPTS TO SAVE THE GOVERNMENT 103

X. THE LAST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 115

XI. A PRECIOUS TRIUMVIRATE 124

XII. WAR WITH ENGLAND 128

XIII. CAPTURE OF BOSTON 141

XIV. THE EUROPEAN COALITION 159

XV. THE ALLIES ATTACK NEW YORK 171

XVI. THE FINAL STRUGGLE 192

XVII. FOREIGN OCCUPATION 198

APPENDIX.

I. THE SOCIALISTIC SPIRIT IN 1885 207

II. A REVOLUTION NEAR AT HAND.--“IT MUST COME” 209

III. A FEMALE SOCIALIST’S ADVICE 211

IV. ATHEISM, COMMUNISM, AND ANARCHY 212

V. THE FORCES ARRAYED AGAINST CIVILIZATION 213

VI. THE PROSPECTS OF AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN DYNAMITERS AND COMMUNISTS 214

VII. TWO CONTEMPORARY CRITICISMS 215

VIII. THE COURTS.--ONE JOURNALISTIC WARNING OUT OF MANY 217

IX. THE UNPROTECTED ATLANTIC COAST 218

X. A SINGLE ILLUSTRATION OF THE IRISH-AMERICAN SPIRIT 219

XI. THE ARMY OF THE DISCONTENTED 222

XII. DEFENDING DYNAMITE ASSASSINATION 223

THE FALL OF THE GREAT REPUBLIC.

I.

INTRODUCTORY.--THE “HARD TIMES” OF 1882–1887.

It is my purpose to relate the fall of the Great Republic. I shall be brief, yet shall omit no detail necessary to a perfect comprehension of the causes which underlay the catastrophe and the events through which it came to pass. I shall set forth the curious sequence of ignorance, wickedness, and folly which led to the terrible result. I shall show how the boasted wisdom of the fathers became the inherited curse of their descendants. I shall describe the political and social revolution by which in a few months a nation of grand promise, and with a history unequalled for its century of growth and achievement, was transformed into the most pitiful wreck of all time. I shall narrate the story whose outcome has proved to the world the utter futility of the experiment of popular self-government, until men shall have attained a richer knowledge and a sweeter morality than thus far exist.

The citizens of the United States felt at the close of the Civil War of 1861–1865 that they had demonstrated their ability to govern themselves wisely and successfully. They considered the experimental stage of their history passed, the volume completed and closed, the verdict rendered. They imagined the possibility of no greater strain on their institutions than had already been triumphantly endured. In truth, there was the appearance of reason in their conviction. No nation had ever more successfully passed the ordeal of civil strife. The magnanimity shown to the conquered rebels after the war, even after the assassination of Lincoln; the temperate endurance with which the country suffered the incubus of Johnson’s maudlin administration; the rapidity and ease with which the enormous war-debt was paid off; the general good-nature which averted bloodshed during the disputed election of 1876; the smoothness with which the administrative machinery bore the shock of Garfield’s murder,--all these events, coming closely after the vindication of the national idea and of personal liberty in the suppression of the Southern rebellion, convinced the people of the United States, and those of other lands as well, that “the experiment of popular self-government” had really achieved success.

And yet there had been warnings enough of the volcano smouldering underfoot, if the eyes and ears of public men had been open to see and hear. Beginning at the time of President Garfield’s assassination, the one cry which went up from the common people, the working people of the land, was for years that of “Hard Times.” Business received a blow in that year from which it did not recover. Trade was slow and meagre; purchases of all sorts were made “from hand to mouth;” workshops and factories lay idle because there was insufficient demand for their products; men who felt keenly the disgrace of failure to support their families were compelled to beg for public aid to keep their humble homes and to supply even the most sordid demands of life. For years the country’s economic policy had been such as to poison the air with false doctrine and enervate the energies of commerce by vacillating action. It would be a bootless task to discuss now the relative merits of “Free-trade” and “Protection” to the United States. Perhaps either policy, adhered to with reasonable fidelity and administered, as to its details, with such common-sense as men are accustomed to use in the conduct of their private affairs, would have obviated the loss of work and the consequent poverty and want which filled the land, from 1882 to 1887, with a constantly deepening tide of misery. But the whole subject was made the shuttlecock of petty politics and pitiful politicians, until the nation ceased to have a policy which could be recognized or was of any avail as a stay before the sweep of commercial failure and pecuniary distress.

It is asserted that no less than two and a half million operatives and working-men were idle in the fall of 1887, when the first serious outbreaks occurred. By far the larger number of these had been unable to earn enough, during the preceding two years, to pay the rents demanded for their cottages and hovels, and were constantly in danger of ejection, without the hope of finding another home. The land was filled with idle workmen, many of them foreigners unaccustomed to free institutions, and bitter in their denunciations of all government, which was to them the synonym of tyranny. Few, of either foreign or native birth, were possessed of sufficient discrimination to discover the underlying causes of their misfortunes, or of wisdom enough to set about remedying them.

Despite the world-wide knowledge of this lack of remunerative employment in the United States, the ranks of the unemployed and dissatisfied there were constantly recruited by immigrants from the most dangerous classes of Europe. The vigorous action which had been taken in 1886 and 1887 by the Governments of Germany, Russia, and Austria, looking to the extirpation in their dominions of socialism, nihilism, and their kindred poisons, and the refusal of Switzerland, England, and France to afford asylum to the expelled fanatics, had forced them to take refuge in America. One or two of the wisest and bravest among the statesmen of the land raised their voices against receiving and harboring these men. But the public had few statesmen in its service. Mere politicians and demagogues were in greater popular favor than statesmen who despised the cheap tricks and unworthy flattery which won the common ear. Public men generally had come to think more of majorities than of principles; to labor for their own election to office rather than for the good of the country. The newspapers were commonly partisan and devoted to purely partisan ends,--the chief of which was, naturally, partisan success. None dared to do or say anything which might offend and alienate voters; and so every steamship from Europe continued to bring to the Atlantic ports of the country full steerage-loads of men who were not thought fit to live under the Governments of Europe, but who, almost on their landing, became citizens and voters in the Republic. Added to these were the tens of thousands of Irishmen whom the stringent measures of Parliament, adopted after the dynamite explosions of 1884 and 1885, had driven from their native island. Over half a million able-bodied men, without mention of women or children, expelled outlaws of Europe, landed at New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the two years of 1885 and 1886. They swelled the ranks of workmen without work, and helped reduce by competition and division the already scanty wages of labor. Every one of them was a poisonous ferment dropped into the already over-stimulated mass of popular discontent and agitation. They invariably united with the existing centres of socialism and Fenianism, making these organizations, even without other converts, tenfold more dangerous than they had ever been before.

II.

THE MORAL INTERREGNUM.

It was in many respects a strange era; it justified the phrase which an eminent writer had suggested for it,--of the “moral interregnum.” Immersed in the cares of private business, and chiefly actuated by an insatiable craving for money or the luxury and social distinction which money brought, the majority of those men who should have been the stay and support of good government paid little heed to public affairs, but rather left them to the control of adventurers, of professional politicians who followed politics as gamblers follow cards,--for the sake of what they could steal from more honest men,--of the least intelligent and least moral members of the state. Their common pleas were, either that they were invariably out-manœuvred in the political battle by these veteran strategists, and that they could do no real good at the primaries and the polls, or that the solid good sense and honesty of the country could be relied upon to come out and assume control whenever things passed beyond endurance, and that, meantime, all effort was simply thrown away. It is a natural assumption, now that the end has been seen of all men, that those who used these arguments must have been either fools or selfish knaves. Yet they comprised within their number a large proportion of the successful business and professional men of the country, who could not have thus succeeded had they been devoid of all ability, and who certainly regarded themselves as honest men. The result of their neglect of their country in behalf of their pockets was that while domestic morality, both ideal and real, remained in many parts of the land upon a lofty plane, public morality practically ceased to exist.

Men were elected to office, not because they were fitted for the positions to which they aspired, nor because any one believed them fitted, but because they were “available;” because they happened to have few active enemies; because they were comparatively unknown, and nothing could be said against them; because they were rich enough to contribute liberally to corruption funds for the purchase of venal voters; because, in short, they were especially unfit for either honor, trust, or responsibility. The tone of public life became deplorably low. Officials of every station accustomed themselves to ask, when any course of action offered itself, not “Is it right? Is it wise?” but “How will it affect my continuance in office? Will it hurt the party’s prospects?”

Saddest of all and most disheartening was the almost universal extent to which this feeling spread among the people. They came to consider this dishonorable and cowardly attitude on the part of Government officers as natural and quite to be expected. The few who remonstrated or pleaded for a more honest official spirit were regarded with good-natured contempt as men meaning well and having lofty ideals, but too visionary for “practical politics;” as “doctrinaires,” “theorists,” etc. There has been corruption in other lands and under other forms of government. But the demoralizing fact in the United States was, not so much that official corruption and cowardice was the rule, as that the people who had the power to rebuke and reform such a condition of things condoned it, took it for granted, continued the corrupt and cowardly time-servers in office and responsibility, or changed them for other equally unfit but shrewder rogues.

It was not strange, in this condition of public sentiment, that other trusts than those of Government were abused. The last decade of the Republic was signalized by an unprecedented number of defalcations, embezzlements, and similar crimes against private trust. In the treatment of these crimes, even more clearly than in regard of public dereliction, the utter demoralization of public opinion was demonstrated. It is true that the public prints teemed after each new rascality with virtuous demands for the infliction of condign punishment. It is true that prosecuting officers commonly made complaints and issued warrants with exemplary promptness, taking good care that the newspapers were duly informed of their energetic action. It is true that occasional embezzlers were actually punished by sentences of imprisonment fixed at the minimum extreme of lax and unjustly lenient laws. But these were exceptional cases. Many of the embezzlers were men of social standing or of political importance; they had numerous friends; and, no matter though their guilt was clear as the day, it was assumed by the nonchalant public,--taken for granted, even by those who had suffered most,--that these friends would use all their influence to obstruct or prevent merited punishment. In a majority of cases they were too successful. Officials who should have stood faithful sentinels over the public weal to compel the enforcement of justice, generally bowed before the influence which might be exerted to oust them from their offices if they should prove inconveniently virtuous. Sometimes the embezzler was allowed to bribe his custodian and escape. Sometimes he was admitted to bail in such a trifling sum that a percentage of his stealings paid the cost of a default. Sometimes he was allowed to bargain with those whom he had robbed.

It was not considered disgraceful or wrong, if a bank cashier had stolen enough to ruin his bank, for the directors to accept his offer to repay half the amount stolen, in consideration of their agreement not to prosecute him. Public sentiment admitted that this compounding felony was objectionable, but refused to condemn the directors who committed the crime for trying to save some of their property from complete wreck. It was taken for granted that men cared more for their wealth than for their honor or the public weal. Even such embezzlers as were actually imprisoned seldom failed to secure from pliant pardoning boards such commutations as rendered their punishment farcical. It came to be a common saying that it was safer to rob a bank of a million dollars than to steal five dollars from a merchant’s till to buy food for a starving wife or child.

The courts, which should have remained the trust and reliance of the people, became as untrustworthy as public sentiment itself. Lawyers adopted the rule that it was their part to win causes for their clients, right or wrong. “Get money! honestly if you can; but get money,” was the motto of the business element. “Win your case! by fair means, if possible; but win your case,” was the motto of the legal guild. The advocate who won his client’s case by taking advantage of technicalities or by securing an incapable or prejudiced jury, or by the introduction of false witnesses whose perjuries could not be exposed at the moment, was sure to attain wealth and a high position at the bar. Actual jury-bribing was suspected in many cases; but those who should have been the first to ferret out such offences cared not enough about the purity of the courts to trouble their leisure with the matter.

The judges aided in many States to make the courts over which they presided inefficient and to bring them into public contempt by their blind adherence to outworn precedent and their indiscriminating affection for technical pleadings. Though generally men of the highest personal probity, they might be relied upon in any trial to ignore the spirit of the law and the interests of society if a clever attorney could point out in the letter of the law or in some century-old precedent anything to justify them in so doing. A misplaced comma was sufficient to overthrow the intent of an entire statute.

This characteristic of the courts found ample room and verge enough for the most fantastic tricks in a society which was governed by annual legislatures, pouring forth with each succeeding session a very flood and freshet of ill-considered and crudely expressed legislation. So complicated and unintelligible at last became the law that those judges and counsellors who really loved Justice and persistently sought after her, were seldom able to discover her form or features through the mist and fog of statutes and codes and revisions and amendments and precedents which filled the atmosphere in every court devoted to law and, ostensibly, to justice. The wisest men and those who devoted their life-long study to the subject were not always able to tell what the law really meant, or whether it meant anything, under the varying interpretations put upon it by different expounders.

Thus it came to pass that any suitor or defendant, provided he was rich enough to secure adroit and learned counsel, was generally able so to delay and hamper the naturally loitering steps of the courts as, by the very law of chance, to bring about opportunities for escape which time could not help affording him. The rich man, whether in a civil or a criminal trial, was much more likely to win his case, whatever its merits, than the man who was unable to employ counsel familiar with the quips and crookednesses of the law. In truth, the prisoner accused of crime who was unable to pay large counsel fees or to bring “influence” to bear in some way or other upon the prosecuting officials, was apt to be treated with comparative severity. Within the same year a bank cashier of New York stole $800,000 from his bank, but escaped all punishment by negotiating with the directors for the return of $400,000; while a young street thief of the same city was sent to the penitentiary for twelve years for stealing a penknife worth twenty-five cents! The needy mechanic who purloined a few dollars worth of old junk and sold it to buy either bread for his family or liquor for himself was fairly sure to be punished with as long a term of imprisonment as the defaulter who made away with millions. He was, moreover, certain of punishment, if detected; while the greater thief had at least three chances in four of escaping untouched.

In all directions public sentiment had become corrupted; the popular aspiration had declined to low and sordid levels: yet men looked calmly on the sham and humbug and selfishness and dishonesty and injustice which made up the social order of the time, and felt neither fear nor disgust. Even those whose moral senses were acute enough to perceive the rottenness around them stopped their moral olfactories and blinded their moral vision with the unworthy reflection that the existing fabric would last out their time; and then the deluge might sweep whither it would.

III.

THE SOCIALISTIC POISON.

Meanwhile, below the thin and treacherous surface, the volcanic fires of a socialistic agitation were blazing up with daily increasing fierceness. The failure of work to laboring men; the widespread and intense suffering consequent thereupon; the conviction that this was not due to any lack of zeal or industry on their part, but to the unequal workings of an artificial and false social order; the growing belief that poverty had become a bar to civil rights, even in the courts, and that wealth had become a sufficient protector of injustice and crime,--all these things combined to add an irresistible weight in the minds of thousands of the less discriminating among the laboring class, especially those of foreign birth, to the arguments and appeals of the socialistic leaders in behalf of a complete overturn,--a “revolution.”

Some of these socialistic apostles were simply theorists who could not comprehend why their lofty ideals were in any way impracticable. Others were fanatics,--honest, zealous, earnest, and illogical as fanatics have always been. Others were really maniacs, whom a long life spent under the oppression and tyranny of foreign monarchies had driven into a fierce and virulent hatred of all government and all order. Others were men who would have been unwilling to earn their daily bread by honest industry, had the means been placed at their hands, but who foresaw in great popular disturbances possibilities for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. All worked harmoniously, however, in the common direction of social anarchy. They had utterly unlike conceptions of the new order which ought to be established on the ruins of the old, but they were united in the one conviction that the old must be wholly demolished before the task of reconstruction could be properly begun. And so idealists of noble but impracticable aspirations, and brawling fanatics, and beery mountebanks, and maniacs ambitious for unbridled and orderless anarchy, though perhaps not on speaking terms with each other personally, worked together for one common end, and that end revolution and destruction.

The vigorous measures which had been taken by all the nations of Europe between 1885 and 1887 to clear their own borders of these revolutionists had been effectual in driving hundreds of thousands of them to America. They brought with them their theories, their fanaticism, their fierce hatred of all orderly society. Belonging for the most part themselves to the working-class, they mingled freely with the discontented and suffering workmen whom they found already too numerous in the land for the work which was offered either to labor or to skill. Everywhere they spread the infection of their destructive theories. Socialistic organizations sprang up, under one name or another, in almost every city and town and village. Beginning with the Hocking Valley riots in 1884–1885, and, like those disturbances, in constantly closer alliance with the trades-unions, these socialistic societies caused numerous local outbreaks in the districts where workmen were most numerous and work hardest to obtain. Pittsburg, Wheeling, and Fall River suffered especial loss in these riots.