James K. McGuire: Boy Mayor and Irish Nationalist

1. July 12, 1868

1 1 July 12, 1868 July 12, 1868, dawned hot and humid, as most July days do in New York City. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the temperature rose with it and the humidity pressed oppressively down on the city and its people like a suffocating, wet, steamy blanket. It seemed like all of the country existed in a cauldron. Even the northernmost states, like Minnesota, were sweltering under the record heat this July. It had been a little more than three years since the end of the “War of the Rebellion,” the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, and the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. His successor, Andrew Johnson, had been impeached and acquitted by the U.S. Senate only the past May.1 The Republican Party had nominated the hero of the war, General Ulysses S. Grant, for president shortly thereafter. The Democrats had met in New York only the week before to nominate former New York governor Horatio Seymour on the twenty-second ballot to oppose him, and a delegation to ratify that selection had met in Philadelphia only the day before. Locally, the results of a coroner’s inquest into a murder in Brooklyn were made public in which it was reported that “The only serious incident that took place in the city on the Fourth of July, was the murder of Francis Kerrigan, an old man who kept a boarding house near the corner of Warren street and Underhill-avenue, who drank whiskey , beat, cut and bruised his drunken boarders, and was frequently engaged in quarrels such as are unusual in sober society.” The newspaper, apparently quoting Coroner Slattery, reported that it was the “result of Drinking Bad Whiskey.” Pickpockets unsuccessfully 2 | Ja m e s K . Mc G u i r e accosted one Edward D. Cope of Philadelphia while he was riding in a stagecoach on Broadway and Bleecker Street, resulting in the arrest of all four members of the gang. Elsewhere in the city, Officers Moran and Moody arrested four men who robbed the stateroom of Henry Haywood of Gardner, Massachusetts, on the steamer City of London as it docked in New York.2 In lower Manhattan, Mary Jane Kennedy McGuire, twenty-three, was giving birth to her firstborn, a son. The young woman had been born in the upstate New York village of St. Johnsville, in Montgomery County, just west of Albany. Her father, John Kennedy, was a prominent farmer there. She was the youngest of six children. Like many families of that period, the Kennedys had been scarred by the war. Her two oldest brothers, Mathew and John, had been Union Army soldiers in Company B of the 34th New York Volunteer Infantry mustered at Little Falls, New York. Both had perished in the Battle of Bull Run. She had two older surviving sisters, Winifred and Margaret, and a brother, Michael.3 Mary Jane had met the tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed Irish shoemaker who became her husband five years before. They had been married in 1864 but, unlike most young Roman-Catholic couples of that era, had not been blessed with children immediately. Her husband, James, had been born on March 3, 1843, in Enniskillen , Ulster, Ireland, two years before the great Potato Famine of 1845–47. The famine so devastated the Irish in Ireland that by one account, “In the west whole families walled themselves into their cabins and died.” Thousands more fled the island, emigrating to the United States, settling in the cities on the eastern seaboard, most notably Boston and New York. The sudden surge of Irish immigrants changed the makeup of the cities dramatically. In New York, “In 1850 26 percent of the population of New York City consisted of persons born in Ireland: some 133,000 out of 513,000.”4 This trend would continue, so that “by 1855 Irish immigrants made up 28 percent of the city’s population , and five years later the New York Irish made up 13 percent of all j u ly 12, 1868 | 3 of the Irish in the United States; making it the Hibernian center of the country.”5 James McGuire was one of them. The precise year in which James McGuire came to New York City is unknown. His obituary notes only that “he came to New York when a boy.” Following his arrival in New York City...