by Peter Quinn
—Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution
I
COLONEL ROBERT NOONAN LAY DOWN to smoke a cigarillo, stretched out carefully, his head propped on two pillows, his boots extended over the bedside. He sucked in the smoke and released it just as the guns on the far side of Governors Island began to fire.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Big guns, they had been shipped to New York a year before, in the wake of the appearance of the ironclad Merrimac at Hampton Roads, and placed behind embankments dug by the Rebel prisoners held in Castle Williams. The North had been thrown into a panic, and although the Monitor had steamed out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, south to the mouth of the James, and arrived in time to save the Union fleet, the city’s defense had nonetheless been reconstructed. From Fort Schuyler to the north, on Long Island Sound, to Sandy Hook, at the eastern tip of New Jersey, new batteries had been put in place, with more and bigger guns and thicker and stronger fortifications. The batteries on Governors Island were part of this effort. They were silent for the first months. But in June, to reassure the city in the wake of Lee’s invasion, General John Ellis Wool, Commander of the Department of the East, ordered them fired every morning.
The city was given no notice. The morning the batteries were first fired, some people thought the Rebels had entered the harbor, and took refuge with their families in cellars and basements. One man stopped a streetcar and forced the driver at gunpoint to race uptown, away from the Rebel assault. Mayor Opdyke appealed to General Wool to halt the firings. “Such cannonading,” the Mayor wrote, “is an unwarranted irritant to the peace and tranquillity of the population.”
General Wool gave no reply other than to keep the guns firing each morning. On July 4th, 1863, the day the news of General Meade’s victory at Gettysburg arrived, General Wool ordered the guns fired continually for two hours until they were so hot the battery commander silenced them out of fear of an accidental explosion. The following day they resumed their regular firing. People ceased to notice. By now, the booming had become as much a part of the city’s life as ferry whistles, church bells, and the roar of traffic.
Noonan had come out to Governors Island the evening before and spent the night. Here, he was too close to the guns not to notice them. The windows of his room rattled. Except for his tunic, he was already dressed. There was nothing more to do. In a few hours the first names would be pulled from the drum, and the draft would be under way. He drew more smoke from his cigarillo. The original plan had called for a massive troop presence throughout the city the day the draft began, but the Confederate invasion had resulted in the city being stripped of troops. If the previous week had brought news of a Union defeat, the draft would have been postponed. Victory had made everyone confident that the machinery of the draft would proceed unimpeded. The guns boomed again, then ceased.
In his office in the city, in the St. Nicholas Hotel, Noonan had mounted a large wall map of the wards that contained the great bulk of the city’s population. He outlined in red those that contained the largest potential for violence, a vast contiguous area that ran from the Second Ward to the Seventeenth and covered most of the neighborhoods east of Broadway and south of Fourteenth Street. People lived there crammed in among factories and slaughterhouses, in cellars, in tenements, in the decaying ruins of the city’s ancient housing stock. To the north was the other potential trouble zone, the shantytowns. Noonan told each provost that the enrolling officers couldn’t rely on voting records or the census to give them a list of eligible draftees. Half those enrolled to vote were, as Tammany called them, “the brothers of Martha and Mary,” men as dead as Lazarus was before Jesus called him from the tomb. These new Lazaruses were summoned only on Election Day, when the likes of John Morrissey and company resurrected and reenfranchised them. In many areas the census was more a sampling than a summation. It avoided most of the hundreds of back-lot tenements reached through dark alleyways, and the cellars where four or five families shared a single room, and the wild terrain of the shantytowns, and the lodging houses where thousands upon thousands took their shelter one night at a time.
Noonan instructed the enrolling officers to visit every building, shanty, tenement, lodge, hotel, house, and cellar. The draft was to be fair. No one would be able to claim that only Catholics or Democrats were being enrolled. Just as Congress had directed, the enrollment would include every male citizen and immigrant aged twenty to forty-five. No exceptions.
Up until the enactment of conscription, the Provost Marshal’s office had been charged with finding and arresting deserters, inquiring into treasonable practices and opinions, detaining disloyal persons, and apprehending spies. Improbable work in New York, where deserters could easily fade into the crowd, where disloyalty was praised by prominent politicians and preached by half the newspapers. But Noonan knew he hadn’t been offered the job to see to those functions; Secretary of War Stanton had chosen him for the purpose of enforcing the draft, setting an Irishman to the task of conscripting other Irishmen. Stanton had telegraphed to see him in February, and despite the discomfort Noonan still suffered from the wounds he’d received at Fredericksburg in December, he had gone.
A trial lawyer accustomed to walking about a room as he talked, Stanton had received Noonan while standing behind a chest-high writing desk. The Secretary had his spectacles pushed on top of his head, and he used both hands to play with the ragged strands of his beard.
“I won’t waste your time, Colonel,” Stanton said. “In a matter of a few weeks, Congress shall have approved the Enrollment Bill. It has been a painful decision for the President, but there is no other way to bring this war to a successful conclusion.”
Behind Stanton was a map of Virginia, Maryland, and the southern border of Pennsylvania. From where Noonan stood the print was too fine to read, but he knew much of the terrain from experience. Antietam, just below the Pennsylvania border. Manassas Junction, where the Manassas Gap Railroad met the Orange & Alexandria. Fredericksburg and the Rappahannock River. The dead piled up in heaps. Equipment strewn across the roads. A landscape of failure.
“The requirements we imposed last summer on the state militias led to a certain level of resistance. We told the states that in addition to the new levy of three hundred thousand three-year volunteers we were calling for, we were also imposing a levy of three hundred thousand nine-month men. The second proviso was merely a stick to encourage men to join and earn a bounty instead of finding themselves required to serve. We told the states we’d count every three-year enlistment as four men against the nine-month quota. It worked. The federal government didn’t have to step in and decide the issue. But in some areas the states found it necessary to employ force in order to fill their quotas.”
Stanton tugged at his beard. “Some of the worst incidents of violence were in the areas with heavy concentrations of Irish, particularly in the coalfields of Pennsylvania, where the situation threatened to get out of hand. I am a man without prejudice against any creed and have never thought of the Irish in particular or papists in general as disloyal or untrustworthy. Many have already proved their loyalty on the battlefield, as you have, Colonel, and the Irish Brigade is among the best fighting units we have.”
“I resisted the idea,” Noonan said.
Stanton brought his spectacles down from the top of his head onto the bridge of his nose.
“Resisted what idea?” he said.
“The Irish Brigade. After Bull Run, I told General Meagher I thought it would be better if recruits simply joined the regular ranks instead of being gathered in regiments distinguished by nation. Archbishop Hughes shared my views. He, too, felt we should fight as Americans, nothing more, nothing less, but we were overruled.”
“I don’t share your reservations. If I could raise a hundred regiments of Irish I would, or of Frenchmen, or of Mussulmen, whatever it takes to fill the ranks and crush this rebellion. That goes for the black man as well.”
Stanton came out from b
ehind his desk and walked over to the window. Several weeks before, General Sickles had stopped in to see him. The former congressman had painted a grim picture of what would happen if conscription were imposed on New York. “I know Paddy as well as anyone can,” Sickles had said. “God bless his Democratic soul, he is as pugnacious and resentful a creature as God put on this earth, and don’t let the veneer of musicality fool you into believing otherwise. In his heart of hearts, every Paddy believes the same thing: that the Know-Nothing–Abolitionist–Protestant Ascendancy has decided that in the contest between him and the nigger as to which will occupy the lowest station in American life, Paddy must win. Remember, the Paddies can be a poetical people when happy, but a murderous one when not.”
“Do you have any objection to the enlistment of the Negro?” Stanton asked Noonan.
“No,” Noonan said. “Although, again, I’m not sure of the wisdom of forming regiments based on race. The whole character and worthiness of an entire people will be judged on the performance of a handful of men.”
“And you have no difficulty with emancipation.”
“None.”
“I am glad to hear that, Colonel. There is no question that emancipation has in some ways simplified the war and made it harder for the British to intervene, but it has raised fears among our own people, particularly in certain quarters of the laboring classes, where there is a general assumption the free black man will soon be competing for jobs.”
“I am in favor of doing what must be done to win the war. Emancipation and conscription both serve that end.”
“Of course I wish the administration had been able to obtain a better, purer form of conscription,” Stanton said. “As it now stands, however, a draftee will have four choices. One, he can allow himself to be drafted. Two, he can refuse the draft and join up on his own, in a regiment of his choice, and thereby earn a volunteer’s bounty. Three, he can pay three hundred dollars and remove himself from this particular levy, although he will be subject to future ones. Four, he can hire a substitute to go in his stead, which will permanently excuse him from the draft. Personally, I resisted these last two conditions. I maintained there should be neither exemptions for sale nor the use of substitution. But the argument was made that substitution is a venerable practice, and that since the Rebels have made it part of their conscription, we should make it part of ours. The three-hundred-dollar exemption, it was argued, would ensure that the bidding for substitutes would not get out of hand. It isn’t a perfect law, but it is a necessary one. We’ll continue to need a steady supply of men. We have all the materials we need, the guns, ships, shells, supplies, and we must ensure we have the men.”
Stanton folded his arms and leaned with his back against the windowsill. That same morning, Frederick Law Olmsted of the Sanitary Commission had given him a recounting of his tour of the Western Theatre. Olmsted had been hopeful about Grant’s chances of taking Vicksburg but wouldn’t venture a guess about when. In terms of men, Olmsted had said, the price would be dear. Undoubtedly it would. But it must be paid. The war had its own momentum now, there was no stopping it, even if it meant arming the contrabands and drafting immigrant riffraff. By the end of the year, the three-year volunteers who had joined at the war’s beginning would reach the end of their enlistments. If they chose to go home, what then? Better not to think about it. Concentrate instead on the campaign ahead, on the carrot of victory and the stick of conscription.
“We need leaders, Colonel,” Stanton said. He paced back and forth in front of Noonan in the same manner as when he charged a jury. “And not just on the battlefield but on the home front. The draft is something entirely new to this nation, a mixing of chemicals whose result we cannot foresee. Enforcing it will be both delicate and dangerous. We are putting military men in charge of all the local departments. The biggest and most important department is in New York City. We need someone there who is reliable and decisive, someone who can be equally fair and forceful.”
Stanton stopped and glanced at the map. Fields and rivers spotted with ruined reputations. McDowell. McClellan. Pope. Burnside. Mistakes. Botched battles. Lost opportunities. Perhaps even, in McClellan’s case, treason. Maybe Hooker would prove the man. By this time next year the map would contain the names of once-insignificant towns, villages, and crossroads raised to fame because of the battles fought around them. That morning, Olmsted had been his usual pedantic, hectoring self, filled with complaints about the conduct of the war. He seemed to believe he was still in charge of constructing Central Park in New York and had talked as if he were giving instructions to some junior landscaper on the proper arrangement of rosebushes. Hooker, he had said, would be beaten by Lee. Said it with that same supercilious smirk with which he said everything, an expression worn by the whole insufferable crowd of New Yorkers who continually descended on the capital with unceasing complaints and unsolicited advice. If only the Union could do without New York.
Stanton already liked Noonan. A New Yorker with a smirk-less face. A good sign. “Colonel, I have talked to a great many people about whom to put in charge in New York. Everyone recommends you.”
As he did every time he told a lie, Stanton pursed his lips. He had tried to break himself of the habit but had never entirely succeeded. He had only talked to a handful of people. Sickles had made the case for one of his protégéi, Duffy, but the man was without real military experience. General Michael Corcoran had put Noonan’s name forward. “You won’t find a better man or a better soldier anywhere,” Corcoran had said. Stanton had mentioned Noonan’s name to several other officers. He had a fine reputation. Been under fire. Wounded. Commander of the Sixty-ninth New York. Best of all, an Irishman.
“What do you know about Colonel Robert Noonan?” Stanton had asked Olmsted at the end of their interview.
“Not much,” Olmsted had said. “He is, I think, a prothonotary of Corcoran’s circle, but while my personal knowledge of Noonan is slight, my general acquaintance with the Irish of New York is all too thorough. The leaders are as corrupt as their followers are ignorant.”
Another point in Noonan’s favor: Olmsted had nothing good to say about him. “Colonel,” Stanton said to Noonan, “I’m offering you the job of Provost Marshal for New York City. I will, of course, give you several days to think about it, but I should like an answer within a week.”
“I accept,” Noonan said.
“Here I’ve been trying to sell you something you were ready to buy as soon as you walked into the room!”
“General Corcoran had already told me why you wanted to see me.”
“You’re a joy to talk to, Colonel. A man who gives simple answers to simple questions! But a word of advice: Get out of Washington as quickly as you can before the mephitic vapors of the Potomac infect you with the verbosity that sooner or later fells all inhabitants of this city.”
When his appointment as Provost Marshal was formally announced, Noonan was invited to the headquarters of the newly formed Union League Club. Carpenters and plasterers were busy transforming what had been a private home into a clubhouse. He stood on the steps a moment. Union Square was empty except for nannies pushing prams. On the other side of the park was the statue of General Washington around which a crowd of a quarter of a million people had swirled that first week of the war. Major Robert Anderson had been there, with the flag he had been forced to take down from Fort Sumter. Men and women had cheered and wept, strangers had embraced, Irishmen, Germans, and True Americans had stood side by side and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Noonan had watched from the stoop of a brownstone on the east side of the park. The crowd had reminded him of the great masses of people Daniel O’Connell had mustered in Ireland, men cheering speeches they couldn’t hear, believing for this moment that the sheer weight of their collective desire was enough to bend the course of history. O’Connell had died a broken man, his crowds scattered to the four winds.
An Irish servant girl appeared at the door and conducted him across a trail
of drop cloths to a small room in the rear of the building that smelled of fresh paint. A. T. Stewart, the city’s leading merchant, and three other men Noonan didn’t recognize were seated around a table. Stewart introduced them to Noonan, and they rose to shake hands. Stewart offered Noonan a seat on his right. The others sat facing them.
“Well, Colonel, our first order of business is to congratulate you,” Stewart said. “We are honored to welcome you to the Union League Club in your new capacity as Provost Marshal. You’re among friends. Anything you say will be held in strictest confidence.”
Noonan heard the intonations of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Stewart’s voice, Ulster speech that had been tamed and trained at Trinity. He tried not to let it annoy him, but it did. “I have no need of such safeguard,” Noonan said. “Anything I say here I could as easily say in the square across the street.”
The girl returned with a tray of tea. They sat in silence as she poured. As soon as she left, Stewart said, “We know you are a busy man, and we have no desire to detain you longer than necessary, but we believe it’s important that you comprehend the full gravity of the situation in this city. As Provost Marshal you know better than anyone the disgraceful prevalence of treasonous opinions in every level of the population.” Stewart pushed his cup aside. He leaned his face close to Noonan’s. The men across the table leaned forward. Stewart lowered his voice. “But, Colonel, what you might not understand is that mixed in with the Secessionist sentiment is something just as repulsive and, in the long run, perhaps even more dangerous.” He pronounced the next word slowly, with great emphasis: “Anarchy.”