By PATRICK T. CONLEY

The Irish Catholic Influx

For those immigrants who arrived in Rhode Island from the 1820s onward–most of whom were Irish Catholics–the Civil War was an Americanization test. These newcomers espoused a religion that many in Rhode Island considered alien, with the immigrants allegedly loyal to a foreign potentate–the pope of Rome.

It is essential to note that native Rhode Islanders, most of whom had English antecedents, did not oppose and discriminate against the Irish merely because of cultural differences between Anglo-Saxon and Celt. Protestant Irish fared well in Rhode Island. For example, Hope Power, great-granddaughter of Irish immigrant Nicholas Power, became the mother of the famous Brown brothers of Providence–James, John, Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses. John’s daughter Abby married Irish-American merchant John Francis, and their son, John Brown Francis, served as governor of Rhode Island from 1833 to 1838. Nicholas Brown II, the grandson of Hope Power, married Ann Carter, daughter of prominent Providence editor and civic leader John Carter, whose Irish father had been a British naval officer. The gifts of Nicholas II to Rhode Island College prompted its renaming to Brown University, an institution whose first president was James Manning, a Baptist clergyman of Irish ancestry. Ann and Nicholas II produced a son named John Carter Brown, a noted businessman and bibliophile. Hope Power’s older sister, Mary, was the mother of Nicholas Cooke, the state’s Revolutionary War governor (1775-1778).

The Reverend James “Paddy” Wilson, a native of County Limerick, Ireland, served as the very popular pastor of Providence’s Beneficent Congregational Church from 1793 until his death in 1839. Rhode Island’s two greatest naval leaders–Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie, and Matthew Calbraith Perry, father of the American steam navy that opened Japan to westernization in 1854–were the sons of Sarah Wallace Alexander, an Irish immigrant from County Down who married mariner Christopher Perry of South Kingstown.

In 1845 Charles Jackson, grandson of an Irish immigrant and later a business partner of Ambrose Burnside, won the race for governor on a platform calling for the liberation of Thomas Wilson Dorr. Jackson’s father, Richard Jackson Jr., was president of the Providence Washington Insurance Company from 1800 to1838, and he served as a four-term U.S. congressman from1808 to 1815.

In 1853 Dublin-born Thomas Davis, a leading industrialist and philanthropist, also became a U.S. congressman; and in 1864 Thomas A. Doyle began an eighteen-year career as mayor of Providence.

Irishness was not the obstacle to acceptance in Rhode Island unless the designation “Catholic” was appended to it. Up through the Civil War decade no Irish Catholic ever held political office in Rhode Island, nor achieved significant economic success, or gained high social standing.

The Irish were the first Roman Catholic group to arrive in Rhode Island in significant numbers. In 1828 they established St. Mary’s in Newport, their first permanent parish, for the laborers at Fort Adams and the Portsmouth coal mines, and followed it in 1829 with St. Mary’s in the North Providence mill village of Pawtucket for the builders of the Blackstone Canal. In 1838 and 1841, respectively, they formed the Providence parishes of SS. Peter and Paul and St. Patrick’s.

The decade of the 1840s saw several important developments that affected the Irish Catholic community. One was the famous Dorr Rebellion, which occurred between 1841 and 1843 over an attempt to broaden democracy in Rhode Island and replace the antiquated Royal Charter of 1663 with a written state constitution. The opponents of political reformer Thomas Dorr were partly motivated by anti-Catholic prejudice and political nativism, themes which have often been ignored in discussions of this colorful episode. Contrary to the suffrage policy of Dorr and his followers, the Rhode Island state constitution of 1843 gave the vote to adult native-born males but retained the real estate voting requirement for the foreign-born, a restriction designed to discriminate against Irish Catholic immigrants. This distinction produced great civil strife until its abandonment in 1888 via the Bourn Amendment. The Civil War and the federal constitutional amendments emanating from that conflict intensified local Irish resentment towards this nativistic dual standard.

Another event of importance was the John Gordon murder trial–the Sacco-Vanzetti case of the nineteenth century. This 1844 travesty of justice, which resulted in the hanging of a young Irish Catholic immigrant on the basis of circumstantial evidence for the killing of prominent industrialist Amasa Sprague, caused such misgiving that it contributed to the abolition of the death penalty in Rhode Island eight years later.

A third significant development was the subdivision of the Diocese of Boston in 1844. Connecticut, Rhode Island, and southeastern Massachusetts were set off as the Diocese of Hartford. The first bishop of this new administrative entity–the frail, devout William Tyler–was a Yankee convert from Protestantism. Although the see city of his new diocese was Hartford, Bishop Tyler decided to govern from Providence, which was a larger, prosperous community with a rapidly growing Catholic population. Tyler chose the Providence church of SS. Peter and Paul as his cathedral.

In 1850 William Tyler died and was succeeded as bishop of Hartford by Irish-born Bernard O’Reilly, derisively called “Paddy the Priest” by some native Rhode Islanders. In 1851 this bold and strong-willed bishop brought Mother Frances Xavier Warde and the predominantly Irish Sisters of Mercy to Providence, where they immediately founded St. Aloysius Orphanage and St. Xavier’s Academy for girls, the first Catholic secondary school in the state. Four years later, during the height of the Know-Nothing movement, O’Reilly personally defended the Mercy nuns from an anti-Catholic mob that had congregated at St. Xavier’s Convent to “free” a young Protestant girl who had allegedly been confined therein.

Returning from a clerical recruiting trip to Europe in 1856, O’Reilly perished at sea when his ship was lost in a North Atlantic storm. This pugnacious prelate was a man for the times– one who courageously resisted nativistic attacks upon his Church. In March 1858 Francis Patrick McFarland, the son of Irish immigrants, succeeded O’Reilly as the third bishop of Hartford and began a tenure that spanned the Civil War and most of the Reconstruction Era.

Paddy the Patriot

Our nation’s greatest internal upheaval, the Civil War, was a testing ground that helped to lessen native fears of Catholic immigrants, especially the irascible Irish. In the north, Catholic sentiment stood behind Abraham Lincoln and the Union. The president’s 1861 appointment of Archbishop John Hughes as a special emissary charged with persuading France’s emperor Napoleon III to remain neutral was a factor in the Union’s successful diplomatic effort to isolate the Confederacy. The militant Hughes had admonished his co-religionists that “there is but one rule for a Catholic wherever he is, and that is to do his duty there as a citizen.”

On the battlefront, the generalship of the devout William Rosecrans, a builder of the still-surviving St Mary’s Church in Newport, and Generals Michael Corcoran, Thomas Meagher, Philip Sheridan, and James Shields, who later became the only person to serve as a U.S. senator from three states, swelled the pride of the Irish Catholic population; and the ministrations of approximately five hundred Catholic nuns to the wounded earned them the title “Angels of the Battlefield.” In a sense Catholic immigrants were given a chance to show their loyalty and prove themselves as Americans in an ordeal by battle.

An interesting aspect of this period was the Catholic attitude toward slavery. The official teachings of the Church did not condemn slavery since theoretically the institution was not opposed to the divine or natural law, but in 1839 Pope Gregory XVI had reiterated the statements of earlier pontiffs by specifically denouncing the slave trade in his apostolic letter to the bishops of the world. In the United States most church leaders failed to question openly the “peculiar institution.” Decidedly against immediate abolitionism with its attendant violence, the bishops adopted a stance that urged compliance with the established laws of the land. Their policy condemned the excesses of slavery, emphasized the protection of slave marriages, and urged improvement of the slave’s condition.

In general, the Catholic laity was also adverse to abolitionism. Southern Catholics–most of them Irish and French–accepted the system and fought to preserve it. In the North and especially in the Northeast, the Irish rejected any fusion with the abolitionists, because leaders of that crusade were in many cases the same individuals who had spearheaded the nativistic Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s. With the coming of war the Catholic hierarchy and laity, with few exceptions, followed the views of their section. The American Church for the most part did not enter the political arena or raise the question of the morality of slavery; rather its viewpoint reflected a strictly legalistic policy tempered by compassion for back men, women, and children.

In Rhode Island the reaction of the Catholic community followed the national trend. On the eve of the conflict, Bishop McFarland urged prayers for peace in a pastoral letter: “If we turn to God with our whole hearts in humility and confidence, we may hope that He will turn from His fierce anger and deliver us from the evils that threaten us.” Later in 1861, preaching at his cathedral in Providence, McFarland echoed the viewpoint of his fellow American bishops when he lectured on “The Catholic Church and Slavery.” After reviewing the historical development of slavery throughout the world, the bishop rejected immediate emancipation as the answer and war as a tool to achieve it. “Slavery, whether we consider it an evil or a sin, is to be cured by removing the cause and eradicating the evil passions which have made slaves and slaveholders,” he said. This was to be done by a return of the community to the “ teachings of the Master,” for “a slave cannot long be held by one who listens to these truths and believes;” only then would emancipation be possible. Concluding his address, the bishop reiterated the Church’s denunciation of the African slave trade and called for the necessary self-sacrifice to heal the nation’s wound. There is little evidence regarding the attitude of the local Catholic community towards the question of slavery, but it is reasonable to assume that it mirrored McFarland’s position.

In the anxious weeks following the shelling of Fort Sumter, Rhode Island was prompt to answer Lincoln’s call to arms. Governor William Sprague, in concert with the future Union general, Ambrose Burnside, led the First Rhode Island Regiment to Washington and the war’s opening battle at Bull Run.

A chaplain of this regiment, the Reverend Thomas Quinn of the Cathedral parish, had asked and received the bishop’s consent to serve the spiritual needs of the Catholics in the unit. Commenting upon the unusual appointment, the thirty-two-year-old chaplain wrote to Bishop McFarland, “I think that your permission that I should go on this duty has done a good deal towards annihilating the Protestant prejudice in Providence.”  Father Quinn–a courageous but sometimes erratic cleric–saw action at Manassas and served briefly with the state’s Third Regiment later in the year.

A more illustrious Civil War chaplain was the noted and prolific author Monsignor Bernard O’Reilly, who served in the diocese for two years (1867-69) as pastor of St. Charles’s Church in Woonsocket. During the war O’Reilly distinguished himself by his heroic service with New York’s famed Irish regiment, the “Fighting 69th,” and later became the official biographer of Pope Pius IX.

Rhode Island provided twenty-two regiments and batteries during the conflict. The Providence Journal described what was probably a typical send-off for Irish Catholic troops:

About one hundred of the Roman Catholic soldiers assembled in the Cathedral Sunday morning, and after the celebration of mass, the Rev. Dr. Carmody addressed them in a very touching and interesting manner. In his address, the Doctor spoke to the men of the glorious cause for which they were to fight, and of the obligation they owed to this, their adopted country. Implicit obedience to their officers was most earnestly enjoined, and the men were exhorted to lead sober and pure lives, so that the examples of the Catholic soldiers might be as a shining light to the whole regiment.

In accordance with a wish expressed by the pastor, sufficient means were contributed to purchase prayer books and spiritual reading for the soldiers.

Father Hugh Carmody’s advice to the troops emphasized the Catholic desire for acceptance without compromising their religious identity. His remarks illustrate the dilemma of Americanization that confronted the immigrant Catholics–especially those “fighting” Irish who were inclined to defend their faith militantly.

The years passed with this scenario repeated. Eventually victory came and the Union was preserved. Then, on Saturday, April 15, 1865, Bishop McFarland’s diary notes that he awakened to hear the news of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The tragedy of the president’s death ushered in the era of Reconstruction, and while the Rhode Island community enjoyed a period of material prosperity, the conditions of poverty wrought by the war in the South prompted the visit to Rhode Island of William Henry Elder, the bishop of Natchez, Mississippi. Elder, who had done pioneer work converting and educating slaves in the prewar years, wrote to Bishop McFarland in November 1866, requesting permission to preach in the diocese with the hope of raising funds to rebuild Mississippi’s war-torn churches. McFarland consented, and the southerner raised $1,000 in Providence as he began his tour of the Rhode Island-Connecticut area. Elder returned again in 1868 and met with another warm reception.

Bishop Augustin Verot of Savannah, Georgia, once a strong secessionist, also preached in the state in an effort to raise money to care for the freed blacks of his diocese. These incidents reveal that the American Catholic Church, one of the few institutions that had remained united before and during the Civil War, was ready to play a significant role in effecting a peaceful reconciliation between the North and the South.

The War Governors

William Sprague IV, Rhode Island’s first Civil War governor, was elected in 1860 at the age of twenty-nine. He was the son of former U.S. Senator William Sprague, III and the nephew of industrialist Amasa Sprague, whose 1843 murder had led to the unjust conviction and execution of Irish immigrant John Gordon.  The so-called “boy governor,” heir to his family’s textile empire, received support from a fusion of moderate Republicans and Democrats, both of whom were wary of alarming the South by electing Republican abolitionist Seth Padelford, who eventually became governor from 1869 to 1873..

After the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Governor Sprague–who had been colonel of the Providence Marine Corps of Artillery–promptly offered President Lincoln political and military support. He even dipped deeply into his personal fortune to equip the state volunteer unit that he accompanied to Washington in 1861. Acting as an aide to Colonel Ambrose Burnside (then commanding the Second Brigade, Second Division, Army of the Potomac), Sprague had his horse shot from under him during the disastrous Union defeat at First Bull Run. Later he was offered the rank of brigadier general of volunteers by Lincoln, but he declined because the Rhode Island Constitution prevented a state official from entering federal service unless that official resigned his state office.

Reelected governor twice in 1861 and 1862, Sprague relinquished that office on March 3, 1863, when the General Assembly elected him to the U.S. Senate as a Republican, leaving Republican State Senate President William C. Cozzens, a former mayor of Newport, to hold the position of chief executive for two months.

In the April 1863 state elections, Republican James Youngs Smith won the governorship, to the dismay of Irish Catholics. Smith had been elected mayor of Providence in 1855 as the candidate of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party, and he had been reelected in 1856 when that xenophobic organization swept all state offices, making William W. Hoppin the governor.

Coming a month after the passage of the controversial federal Conscription Act of March 1863, Smith’s victory certainly dampened the ardor of Rhode Island’s Irish Catholics and provided further evidence that the local Republican Party had embraced the personnel and the anti-Irish attitudes of the Know-Nothing, or American Party.

Surprisingly to some, Smith proved to be an able, feisty, resourceful, and compassionate chief executive. Ralph S. Mohr, a biographer of Rhode Island’s governors, provided an assessment of Smith’s tenure that merits extensive citation:

As a War-Governor his record was noble and unsurpassed. To the filling of the State’s quota and the speedy and decisive overthrow of the Rebellion he gave himself with untiring devotion, and by special and wise exertions spared the State the necessity of resorting to a [second] draft; and amid the multitude of heavy duties growing out of the war and the demands of an extensive business, his time and attention were given to the humblest applicant for aid or advice, his office being crowded from morning till night. His donation to the soldiers and their families were large, and when a friend suggested that he was giving too largely, he replied, “I allow no man to come between me and my charities; that is a duty I am responsible for only to my God.”

Though he feuded over this issue with the federal provost marshal, Governor Smith avoided conscription in Rhode Island and its attendant protests after the initial conscription effort of July 1863. His formula consisted of vigorously enticing volunteers with such inducements as a bounty of $300 paid to the recruiter of each three-year volunteer; a bounty of $300 given to each person liable to the draft who procured an acceptable substitute; free tuition in all public schools and at the Rhode Island Normal School (now Rhode Island College) for children of officers and soldiers; and a preference for such children as beneficiaries of the state scholarships available at Brown University under he Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862. These efforts brought results. For the four years of the war, the enlistment quotas set by the federal government for Rhode Island totaled 18,898; the War Department records credit Rhode Island with furnishing 23,699 men (state records list 23,236, and the adjutant general’s tally is 23,457)–an excess of approximately 25 percent over the quotas.

During the conflict 489 members of Rhode Island military units were killed in action or died of wounds and another 1,206 succumbed to disease, producing a death toll of 1,695, or 1 in 14 of our recruits. Rhode Island’s soldiers generally performed courageously; and its war governors wielded the only significant power given to them by Rhode Island’s constitution–the duty of commander in chief–with determination and effectiveness.

In 1866 Smith stepped aside in favor of General Ambrose Burnside. Despite his tactical miscues at Fredericksburg and the Battle of the Crater, Burnside had performed creditably in smaller encounters in coastal North Carolina and in eastern Tennessee, and he remained a popular military figure, both with his soldiers and his fellow citizens.

Burnside was elected governor of Rhode Island three times–in 1866, 1867, and 1868–as a Republican (despite his prewar Democratic leanings). As chief executive he unsuccessfully supported a state constitutional amendment that would have allowed Civil War soldiers who were naturalized citizens to vote without the requirement of owning real estate.

In 1874 General Burnside (whose unusual facial whiskers gave “sideburns” to the language) became a U.S. senator. During his tenure Burnside chaired the Committee on Education and Labor and the Committee on Foreign Relations. Notably, he fought for a bill allowing black applicants special admissions privileges at West Point. While serving his second term, he was stricken with a heart attack and died at Edgehill, his Bristol home, on September 13, 1881.

The Fighting Irish

Although this essay focuses on the home front, brief mention of the martial spirit of Rhode Island’s Irish Catholics–both on Southern battlefields and local training grounds–is necessary because of its impact on the attitude of Rhode Island’s dominant Yankee community.

Like their counterparts in other states, the Rhode Island Irish attempted to form a single Civil War unit, which they named the Sarsfield Guards. Historian Scott Molloy, who has meticulously examined Rhode Island newspapers for Irish topics from the time of the Dorr Rebellion into the early twentieth century, observes that several local newspaper articles noted the attempt by suffrage reformer Peter A. Sinnot and others to forge this exclusively Irish regiment. The effort failed, states Molloy, “apparently from a lack of Irish officers, internal fighting, and opposition among the local Yankee military hierarchy, with the Dorr Rebellion in mind, against forming such a segregated force.”

Other embryonic units such as the Irish American Guards and Pawtucket Guards never reached full term, so in June 1861 the three organizations published the following resolution in the Providence Journal: “We, adopted citizens, view with distrust the efforts of certain persons to raise an Irish Regiment in Rhode Island, and that while we would hail with pleasure such a Regiment, we have no confidence in its (would be) leaders, and consider their intrusion detrimental to the progress of our companies.” Undaunted by their inability to form a full fighting regiment, a contingent of the Sarsfield Guards marched in Providence on St. Patrick’s Day in 1862.

Although their plans for an all-Irish regiment (similar to New York’s “Fighting 69th) did not materialize, Irish Catholics fought in every one of Rhode Island’s twenty-two regiments and batteries during the four-year conflict. There are no exact figures regarding Catholic enlistments, but one can make a reasonable assumption from data contained in the report compiled by Rhode Island’s adjutant general at war’s end. Of the 23,457 soldiers who enlisted in Rhode Island units (the War Department counted 23,699), 5,729 men were of foreign birth or parentage, and an overwhelming number of these were Irish. This figure does not include those Rhode Islanders of foreign stock who enlisted in regiments of other states (especially Massachusetts) or enlistees in the navy, and there were a considerable number in both of these categories.

During the years of bloody strife, Rhode Island’s Irish saw action in the Carolinas and Florida, at Gettysburg, and in all of the major battles on the Virginia front–Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Petersburg, and the final surrender at Appomattox.

Sixteen of the more than 23,000 Rhode Islanders who served received the newly minted Congressional Medal of Honor for acts of bravery, and among these heroic few John Corcoran and James Walsh were members of the local Catholic immigrant community.

The Third Regiment, Rhode Island Heavy Artillery, a regiment that fought principally around Charleston and along the Atlantic coast as far south as Florida, received the most Irish recruits. Certain segments of this regiment were under the able command of Colonel Charles Ray Brayton, the future infamous Republican political boss. According to Molloy, “Irish-born soldiers eventually composed one-fourth of the regiment’s huge roster.” Historian Charles Carroll computed the unit’s casualties as follows: “Of 2,023 names on the roll of the regiment, including 300 reenlisted veterans, thirty-nine were killed, seventeen died of wounds, seventy-seven died of disease or other causes, eighty were wounded, and 269 were discharged for disability.”

The Reverend Thomas Quinn served briefly as chaplain of this volunteer regiment before the Third was reorganized in December 1861 as a heavy artillery unit with twelve companies. Father Quinn led Bishop McFarland to believe, somewhat optimistically, that the Irish Catholic response to the war effort had “dissipated the prejudices of our distrustful neighbors.”

One of Quinn’s successors, Baptist minister and historian Frederic Denison, served as chaplain of the Third Artillery from January 1863 to October 1864 and wrote a history of the regiment entitled Shot and Shell. The extremely ecumenical Denison, initially chaplain of the First Regiment, Rhode Island Cavalry, would later lead the movement to erect a memorial in Providence’s North Burial Ground to the memory of French-born General Alfred Napoleon Duffie, commander of that mounted unit, whom Denison described as a “liberal” Catholic. Denison was also the prime mover in establishing the monument in that cemetery at the burial site of those French soldiers of Count Rochambeau’s allied army who died in Rhode Island during America’s War for Independence. Under Denison’s compassionate care, the Irish members of the Third Artillery had a chaplain as attentive to their spiritual needs as one of their own.

The Fenian Frenzy

While Rhode Island’s Irish Catholics won some measure of acceptance by their performance on the battlefront, their martial ardor induced by the Civil War led to actions on the home front that alarmed and antagonized many native Rhode Islanders of English ancestry. The concurrent campaign in Ireland for home rule and eventual independence from Protestant England attracted the attention and support of Catholic Irish in America, both during and in the immediate aftermath of America’s Civil War. This urge to free the Irish homeland of English oppression generated what historian Matthew Smith and I have called “the Fenian Frenzy.”

In 1848 a revolutionary republican movement known as “Young Ireland” was suppressed by the British government and its leaders were exiled. The spirit of rebellion persisted, however, and surfaced a decade later in the guise of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, founded in Dublin on March 17, 1858, by Young Irelander James Stephens. By April 1859 the society had spread to the United States. One of its American organizers, John O’Mahony, an exile of 1848, reached into his store of Irish folklore and called the new revolutionary society the “Fenians” after the heroic band of warriors, Fianna Eireann. The Fenian brotherhood was to be a modern replica of that ancient fighting force that would accomplish the design initiated by Wolfe Tone and carried forward by the 1848 rebels–an Irish republic established by forceful revolt.

Based in New York and strongly imbued with the romantic idealism of the European liberals, the international society dreamt of freeing Ireland from centuries of English oppression. The Civil War gave impetus to the movement, since Fenian leaders encouraged Irish soldiers to enlist their new-found military skill in the cause of Irish freedom once the American conflict had ended. Basically, the American Fenian Brotherhood planned to supply money, arms, and men to assist their Irish counterparts. To achieve these goals, O’Mahony called a national convention of interested Irishmen in 1863 and formed a secret society that became a quasi-Irish government in exile.

After the 1865 Fenian national convention in Philadelphia, the movement split over aims. One faction, led by O’Mahony, desired only to foment a revolution in Ireland, while the more popular group, led by wealthy New Yorker William Randall Roberts, hoped to use the large number of trained Irish soldiers just discharged by the Union and Confederate armies to launch an invasion of British Canada. By unleashing his Irish “legions,” Roberts wanted to instigate a war between the United States and England. If successful, this proposed conflict would divert the British and enable the movement in Ireland to secure its goal of independence.

As far-fetched as these schemes appear, the Fenian factions were in earnest; they were numerically strong, boasting forty-five thousand members, and they had the moral support of a large segment of the Irish immigrant community. But their plans did not match their dreams, and their efforts failed after a series of comic fiascoes. Attacks on Canada did take place: the first in 1866 when Civil War veteran John O’Neill led eight hundred followers from Buffalo, New York, into a quixotic bout with Canadian militia; the second in 1870 when Fenians made a foray across the border from St. Albans, Vermont, where they were driven back by one volley of rifle fire. Their planned revolt in Ireland in 1867 also occurred but was easily suppressed. After the St. Albans raid the Fenian movement lost its vitality and its numbers. It lingered on for the next two decades with hopes unextinguished, but its peculiar romantic appeal was gone.

The Fenian crusade had a direct bearing on Rhode Island. With its sizable Irish population and its proximity to New York, the state became a natural recruiting center for Fenianism. Early in 1865 New York organizers William J. Haynes and William Delaney brought the campaign for Irish independence to Providence and received a very enthusiastic reception. By August support was so widespread that a state outing was held at Rocky Point in Warwick. Preceding the picnic, a parade was held in Providence with fifteen hundred marchers representing Fenian units from Pawtucket, Central Falls, Woonsocket, Cranston, Bristol, Harrisville, Newport, and the capital city. Arriving at Rocky Point by ferry and horse, over five thousand supporters listened to national “president” O’Mahony exhort the crowd to support the cause.

Under the leadership of the organization’s state president Patrick McGreevey and able lieutenants Patrick O’Malley and John P. Cooney, most Rhode Island Fenians backed the O’Mahony faction when the movement split in 1866. An ensuing period of confusion over national allegiance was not settled until 1868, when the would-be conqueror of Canada, John O’Neill, appeared in Providence to heal the breach, and both factions united once again.

Fenianism made a comeback in Rhode Island in 1868, and cries for Irish independence were heard once more throughout the state. By the early 1870s, however, the national movement began to wane, and its counterpart in Rhode Island also lost its vitality. The futile St. Albans raid, reaction to the violent Orange Riots of July 1871 in New York City, and the opposition of Bishop McFarland helped to discredit Fenianism locally.

During the brief heyday of the Brotherhood, the American Catholic Church looked with fear upon the movement, for it seemed analogous to the “radical” republicanism that had engulfed Italy and other European countries. As early as 1865 Archbishop John McCloskey of New York had condemned the Fenians for their secretiveness and violence, but most American bishops, not wishing to alienate the Irish immigrant community, drew back from open condemnation. Bishop McFarland was in this difficult position. At least one of his clergy, the Reverend Bernard O’Reilly of Woonsocket, was very sympathetic to the movement and a Fenian priest, Father Vaughn, visited the state on a lecture tour. Also, the state’s Irish population vigorously supported the cause. While confiding distaste for the movement in his diary, the bishop waited for several years to oppose it openly. Reacting to the New York riots, he condemned the violence of that encounter and reiterated the Church’s opposition to secret societies. His message was clear. It was followed by papal denunciation later the same year, and the movement disappeared from Rhode Island as quickly as it had come.

In 1870, however, the Ancient Order of Hibernians formed its first Rhode Island unit. This Irish fraternal organization also had a reputation for violence at this stage of its development, especially in the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania. But the AOH gradually shed its militancy and grew in numbers and respectability, becoming one of the most important Irish societies in the state.

By the time that the Fenian Frenzy expired in 1871, the Boston Pilot, the highly influential Catholic newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, listed six Irish Catholic militia units around the state: the Rhode Island Guards Battalion, the Kearney Cadets, and the Wolfe Tone Guards of Providence; the Lonsdale Light Infantry; the Aquidneck Rifles of Newport; and the Light Infantry of Bristol. Those natives who remembered the Dorr Rebellion and who continued to uphold the Rhode Island constitutional impediment to the right of naturalized citizens to vote must have regarded these Catholic paramilitary organizations with some misgiving.

The Politics of Prejudice

Despite the distraction of Civil War, Rhode Island’s Irish Catholics became involved in major political and social questions of the day. The Adopted Citizens’ Association, established in 1861 under the leadership of Peter A. Sinnot of the Sarsfield Guards and Michael Brennan, worked strenuously during the Civil War years to secure the same voting rights for naturalized citizens as those enjoyed by the native-born. The group–a forerunner of the Equal Rights Party of the 1880s–was Irish-led and quite vocal.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the Adopted Citizens’ Association, no headway was made in the area of suffrage reform. Even such a limited concession as granting the franchise to foreign–born soldiers and sailors who served the Union cause during the Civil War was rejected by the electorate.

A constitutional amendment giving equal voting rights to naturalized servicemen honorably discharged from Rhode Island units was proposed by State Senator Elisha R. Potter Jr. In August 1861 the South Kingstown legislator, who had drafted an enlightened statement on Bible reading in the public schools while commissioner of education in 1854, observed that the time had probably not arrived when the people of the state would repeal the real estate qualification completely, but he thought that the electorate would look with favor on those naturalized citizens who risked their lives for the preservation of the Union. Potter was wrong. His proposed amendment passed two successive sessions of the General Assembly, but it was soundly rejected at a popular referendum in October 1863 by a vote of 1,346 in favor and 2,594 against. Just before the balloting, the Providence Journal published a series of editorials that questioned whether naturalized citizens who had simply enlisted in the state militia should be given the right to vote as the proposed amendment might do. These negative editorials, according to one knowledgeable observer, “had a perceptible influence upon the vote.” This referendum also produced a broadside urging approval, stressing the impact of rejection upon Irish American soldiers: “Should this act be defeated how think you the men of the glorious Third R.I.V., who are bleeding in the trenches before Charleston will feel?”

In 1864 the legislature rephrased the amendment to grant the vote without a real property qualification to naturalized citizens who had been in the service of the United States and honorably discharged. This proposition fared better than the first, receiving 2,174 votes in favor and 1,578 votes against, but it failed to pass by a margin of 78 votes because a proposed amendment under Rhode Island’s inflexible basic law needed the approval of three-fifths of those electors voting thereon.

The movement for general suffrage reform intensified in the period immediately following the Civil War . State statistician Dr. Edwin M. Snow noted in his 1865 state census–a tally which revealed that nearly three out of every eight Rhode Islanders were of Irish stock–that “only one in twelve or thirteen of the foreign-born of adult age was a voter.”  Leaders in the drive for liberalization of the franchise included Governor Ambrose Burnside, who supported the vote for naturalized veterans; former Democratic Congressman Thomas Davis, a Dublin-born Protestant who had been ousted from the United States House of Representatives by the Know-Nothing landslide of 1854; Providence Republican Mayor Thomas Doyle, a Protestant also of Irish descent; and State Senators Sidney Dean of Warren and Charles C. VanZandt of Newport.

The most fervent and outspoken advocate of suffrage reform in the immediate postwar era, however, was young, energetic, and articulate Charles F. Gorman from the Wanskuck area of North Providence, a section that was annexed by the city of Providence in 1873-74 and fell within the boundaries of St. Edward’s Parish. Gorman was born in Boston in 1844, the son of Charles and Sarah J. (Woodbury) Gorman. His father was a native of Ireland, but his mother was descended from one of the original settlers of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

Gorman–who was admitted to the bar in 1865, elected to the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1870, and elected to the Providence Common Council in 1875–is reputed to have been the first Irish Catholic to achieve each of these distinctions. During the last third of the nineteenth century, he devoted most of his legal talent and his political energy to the cause of constitutional reform, or “equal rights,” as the movement was then called.

In November 1876 Gorman led another futile effort to allow foreign-born soldiers and sailors to vote on the same terms as native citizens (11,038 for to 10,956 against), but this measure did not succeed until April 1886 when, under Gorman’s lead, it became Article of Amendment VI to the Rhode Island Constitution.

The Constitutional Legacy of Civil War

Many historians, myself included, regard the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution as the most beneficial and enduring results of the Civil War. They were inspired and necessitated by that bitter conflict.

The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, became effective in 1865. Its ratification by the General Assembly on February 2 posed no problem for Rhode Island’s Republican political leadership. Rank-and-file Rhode Island Irish Catholics neither opposed nor rejoiced. There was no love lost between local Irish and blacks, but this attitude was not only due to unalloyed white racism, or to competition over menial jobs. The Irish resented the blacks because of the role the latter had played during the Dorr Rebellion. In that local civil war the Providence black community sided with the Law and Order Party and against Thomas Wilson Dorr and his reform effort; but they had good reason. Not only did many blacks have employment connections with Law and Order leaders, but also Dorr’s People’s Constitution failed to restore voting rights (lost in 1822) to blacks. As historian Erik Chaput has shown, this omission prompted Providence black leaders to petition the Law and Order convention in language that was less than ecumenical. Their November 1841 memorial reminded the convention’s conservative delegates that blacks were not “foreign born” nor were they “accustomed to a political creed repugnant to democratic principles.” A “foreign birth and adverse usages, that might possibly beget uncongenial political sympathies and sentiments exists not in our case,” asserted the black petitioners. No race had a monopoly on prejudice.

The People’s Constitution gave all white male citizens, including those naturalized, the vote, but over Dorr’s strenuous objection it left black voting rights to be determined in a subsequent referendum. When the Law and Order faction prevailed, its 1843 constitution rewarded Rhode Island’s blacks with the vote for their assistance in deposing Dorr, but it required naturalized citizens, most of whom were Irish Catholics, to own real estate in order to vote and hold public office. In effect, Rhode Island’s naturalized Irishmen became second-class citizens in relation to blacks. The great Afro-American historian and activist W. E. B. DuBois wrote in his autobiography about the bitter prejudice that he witnessed growing up in neighboring post-Civil War Massachusetts: “The racial angle,” said DuBois, “was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me.”

Fortunately, Rhode Island experienced no violent mob demonstrations such as the New York City draft riots of July 1863, when laboring class opponents of the Republican Party’s new federal conscription act (most of whom were Irish Catholic Democrats) burned draft offices, closed factories, destroyed railroad tracks and telegraph lines, and fought pitched battles with policemen and soldiers before turning their murderous wrath against the city’s black community. Nonetheless, it is clear that Rhode Island’s politically powerless Catholic Irish fought for Union rather than for emancipation, whereas blacks naturally fought for both, as evidenced most notably by the creation in 1863 of their own unit–the Fourteenth Regiment, Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (Colored).

Local Irish resistance to the Conscription Act of March 1863 (which allowed the well-to-do to buy a substitute for $300) was very minor. According to local newspapers, parishioners of St. Charles Church in Woonsocket staged a protest, and some Irish women in Newport’s Fifth Ward pelted a draft officer with mud and stones “in the true Irish style” when he tried to serve conscription notices upon their sons and husbands. These comparatively mild remonstrances stemmed from poverty rather than from prejudice. Unfortunately, however, defensive responses to Anglo-Protestant prejudice towards them narrowed Irish Catholic perspectives. As victims of bigotry, they became its hostage, rendering them unwilling to empathize with other targets of ethnocultural and racial discrimination.

The Fourteenth Amendment, appended to the federal Constitution in 1868, defined national citizens in a manner that included blacks: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.” The language of the amendment then went on to protect U.S. citizens from any state action “which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.” It then admonished every state not to “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

 Fittingly, the General Assembly easily ratified this new law of the land on February 12, 1867, the date of Lincoln’s birthday. Not only did this amendment meet with little Irish opposition; attorney Charles E. Gorman, the state’s first Irish Catholic member of the bar, hoped that it could be used to negate the real estate requirement for voting–imposed only by Rhode Island–that deprived naturalized citizens not only of equal protection of the laws but also of the privileges and immunities guaranteed to U.S. citizens by that amendment. Sadly, the U.S. Supreme Court did not adopt that interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment until the 1960s.

The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment by Rhode Island was much more controversial, because it brought the issue of nativity into sharper focus. While Gorman pressed for state suffrage reform, United States Senator Henry B. Anthony worked in an equally zealous manner for continued restriction. Throughout the congressional debates on the Fifteenth Amendment, Anthony fought to limit it to blacks alone. In February 1869, during the confusing course of this voting rights amendment through Congress, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts submitted a plan to broaden the originally presented measure by abolishing all qualifications for voting or holding office based on “race, color, nativity, property, education, or religious belief.”  In effect, Wilson, who chided Rhode Island for its nativistic restriction, posed the controversial question of whether the amendment should confine itself to black suffrage or undertake sweeping reform of voting and office-holding qualifications.

Henry Anthony took sharp issue with Wilson on the floor of the Senate, scolding him for interference in Rhode Island’s affairs. His state’s voting laws, warned Anthony, “were not made for the people of Massachusetts; they were made for us, and whether right or wrong, they suit us, and we intend to hold them; and we shall not ratify any amendment to the Constitution of the United States that contravenes them, and we have the satisfaction of knowing that, without our State, the necessary number of twenty-eight states cannot be obtained for the ratification of any amendment whatever.”

The adamant anti-Irish Anthony knew Rhode Island’s support for the Fifteenth Amendment was critical because several already “reconstructed” southern states, as well as Oregon and California, seemed certain to reject it. This undoubtedly inspired his threatening remark. Anthony and a majority of his colleagues, who were animated by different motives, eventually prevailed. The Fifteenth Amendment in its final form was limited to blacks (“race, color, or previous condition of servitude” ) and left such oppressed ethnic minorities as the Irish of Rhode Island and the Chinese of California unprotected.

When the Fifteenth Amendment came to Rhode Island for ratification in 1869, the controversy centered on the Irish rather than the Negro vote. Rhode Island blacks had enjoyed the suffrage since 1843 (as a reward for helping the Law and Order establishment in suppressing the Dorr Rebellion), so the amendment would not affect their status. However, overly-cautious Republican conservatives, led by Anthony and Congressman Nathan F. Dixon, feared the word “race” in the amendment could be interpreted to mean “ethnicity” and thereby invalidate Rhode Island’s real estate voting requirement for the foreign-born. One contemporary reporter wrote that “many Republicans were afraid of the Amendment not because they liked the Negroes less but because they feared the Irish more.”

Supporters of ratification included newly elected Republican Governor Seth Padelford and Congressman Thomas A. Jenckes, leaving the dominant Republican Party divided on the issue. One resourceful advocate of ratification said that if the amendment were interpreted to allow naturalized citizens equal voting rights, a literacy test could then be imposed to disfranchise many of them. Finally, in January 1870, the General Assembly ratified the Fifteenth Amendment despite factional feuding, constitutional confusion, and ethnic tension, but the measure had been so emasculated by Anthony and his congressional colleagues and would be so narrowly interpreted by the courts that it afforded Charles Gorman and his Irish Catholic followers no comfort or relief.

Despite this setback, the relentless Gorman circulated a petition in May 1870 signed by nearly three thousand citizens, which he presented to Congress with a request that it decide whether or not the constitution of Rhode Island conflicted with the recent Civil War amendments. When Congress disclaimed jurisdiction, preliminary steps were taken by Gorman in 1872 to test Rhode Island’s real estate qualification in the United States Circuit Court. Before his case was reached for argument, the Supreme Court, in three related decisions, undercut his position.

The Civil War and Civility

During the mid-nineteenth century there were two dissimilar traditions prevalent among Rhode Island Catholic clergymen. One was Irish Catholic–zealous, militant, defensive, insular, and antagonistic to the native Protestant community. Its archetype was Bishop Bernard O’Reilly. The other, a minority tradition, may be called “Yankee Catholic;” it included native American converts to the faith like Bishop William Tyler and conciliatory clerics who attempted to build bridges to the local Protestant community. Bishop McFarland belonged to this more tolerant civic tradition. His diary speaks of preaching in a local Protestant church and subscribing $500 to the establishment of Rhode Island Hospital, on whose corporation he later served.

As the emotionalism of the Know-Nothing movement subsided and Irish Catholics stepped forward to defend the Union during the Civil War, the bishop was able to raise the level of religious dialogue to a more rational plane. During his fourteen years in Providence, he defended the Church’s teachings and persuasively explained the most difficult doctrines of the day–the Immaculate Conception and, after the first Vatican Council, papal infallibility. His forte was Catholic apologetics. Through his learned approach he helped to alleviate tensions between the immigrant and native communities.

During McFarland’s episcopacy, which was altered by the creation of the Diocese of Providence in 1872, the Catholic Church in Rhode Island continued its impressive expansion and gradually shed its image as a mission church. By 1870 the state had approximately 90,000 Catholic inhabitants (most of them Irish) in a total population of 217,000. Irish Catholicism was an inescapable aspect of Rhode Island life.

The Civil War had been a testing ground that helped to mollify native fears of Irish Catholics. Animated by a desire to preserve the Union and thereby prove their Americanism, Irish immigrants and their sons fought side by side with Yankee boys. By sharing the same hardships and spilling their blood in the most costly battles in our country’s history, they forged a common bond that diminished–but did not eliminate–the ethnoreligious bitterness and distrust that had plagued the two preceding decades.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Though a number of fine Rhode Island regimental histories and other military narratives have been published, very little has been written about Rhode Island’s home front during the Civil War decade. The essays in this booklet are an initial attempt to fill that void. With immigrant-stock Irish Catholics numbering well over one-third of the state’s population by 1865, their reaction to the Civil War and its constitutional aftermath merits examination.

In the preparation of this essay I have relied mainly upon the following works:

Charles E. Gorman, An Historical Statement of the Elective Franchise in Rhode Island (Providence, 1879); Patrick T. Conley and Matthew J. Smith, Catholicism in Rhode Island: The Formative Era (Providence, 1976); Rev. Robert W. Hayman, Catholicism in Rhode Island and the Diocese of Providence, 1780-1886 (Providence, 1982); Scott Molloy, Irish Titan, Irish Toilers: Joseph Banigan and Nineteenth Century New England Labor (Durham, N.H., 2008); Edward Field, “The Wars and the Militia” in Field, ed., State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century, 3 vols. (Boston, 1902), 1:515-523; Charles Carroll, Rhode Island: Three Centuries of Democracy, 4 vols. (New York, 1932), 2:599-645.  Patrick T. Conley, The Irish in Rhode Island: A Historical Appreciation (Providence, 1986); Robert M. Laffey, “The Movement to Achieve Suffrage Reform in Rhode Island, 1829-1888″ (master’s seminar paper, Providence College, 1978); Patrick T. Conley, “No Landless Irish Need Apply: Rhode Island’s Role in the Framing and Fate of the Fifteenth Amendment,” Rhode Island History 68 (summer/fall, 2010), 79-90; Robert A. Wheeler, “Fifth Ward Irish Immigrant Mobility in Providence, 1850-1870,” Rhode Island History 32 (1973), 53-61; and Ralph S. Mohr, Rhode Island Governors for Three Hundred Years, 1638-1959 (Providence, 1959).

Rev. Austin Dowling, “The Diocese of Providence,” in William Byrne, ed., History of the Catholic Church in the New England States, 2 vols.(Boston, 1899), 1:351-464, and Rev. Thomas F. Cullen, The Catholic Church in Rhode Island (Providence, 1936), though useful, are more ecclesiastical than social in nature. Dowling rose from the position of rector of the Providence Cathedral to the post of archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Information about Rhode Island Catholics on the battlefields of the Civil War is contained in Elisha Dyer, comp., Rhode Island Adjutant General’s Report, 1861-1865, 2 vols., a revised compilation published in 1893 of Rhode Island’s Civil War volunteers; Edwin Winchester Stone, Rhode Island in the Rebellion (Providence, 1864); and Harold R. Barker, History of the Rhode Island Combat Units in the Civil War (Providence, 1964). Barker’s book contains a bibliography of Rhode Island units, the most important of which, from the Catholic perspective, was the Third Rhode Island. On that regiment, see the narrative by its chaplain:  Rev. Frederic Denison, Shot and Shell: The Third Rhode Island Heavy Artillery Regiment in the Rebellion, 1861-1865 (Providence, 1879).

Robert Livingston Stanton’s, The Church and the Rebellion (Auburn, N.Y., 1864) is an early discussion of the Civil War’s impact on American religious denominations. See also Richard Roscoe Miller, Slavery and Catholicism (Durham, N.C., 1957); Madeleine H. Rice, American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery Controversy (New York, 1944); Rev. Benjamin Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee,1945); and Robert J. Murphy, “The Catholic Church in the United States during the Civil War Period, 1852-1866,” Records and Studies of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, vol. 39 (1928), 271-346.

The activities of the Fenians are described by Leon O’Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma (London, 1971); William D’Arcy, The Fenian Movement in the United States, 1858-1886 (Washington, 1947); Brian Jenkins, Fenians and Anglo-American Relations during Reconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969); and Maurice Harmon, ed., Fenians and Fenianism (Dublin, 1968).

Also instructive, but in sharp contrast with the Rhode Island experience, is Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1990); and Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington, Ky., 1974).