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Chapter 4. To Battle with a “Two-Edged Sword”
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96 4 To Battle with a “Two-Edged Sword” { America is Irland’s refuge Irland’s last hope destroy this republic and her hopes are blasted[.] If Ireland is ever ever [to be] free the means to accomplish it must come from the shores of America. . . . When we are fighting for America we are fighting in the interest of Irland[,] striking a double blow [and] cutting with a two edged sword[.] For while we strike in defence of the rights of Irishmen here we are striking a blow at Irlands enemy and opressor. —Civil War soldier Peter Welsh, in Kevin O’Neill, “The Star-Spangled Shamrock: Memory and Meaning in Irish America” The diasporic imagination—that sense of undying membership in, and unyielding obligation to, a distant national community. —Matthew Jacobson, Special Sorrows When the British went after Young Ireland’s firebrand leaders in Dublin in 1848, John Cain made certain that his Rutland Courier readers knew about it: “The Government have [sic] arrested W. S. O’Brien, and Messrs. [Thomas Francis] Meagher and [John] Mitchel [sic], for sedition ” (April 12, 1848). Cain’s columns kept the Irish in Rutland informed about what happened at home. In their major battles after 1857, Rutland’s Irish had the Courier on their side. Cain was a Democrat who attended national conventions and who pushed civic activism and the party’s line in his columns. Cain, an immigrant from the Isle of Man in 1832, “espoused the Democratic views of Jefferson and Jackson, and valiantly defended the doctrines of that party and became prominent in its ranks.” An architect and builder, he also served as Rutland’s postmaster and ran for Congress (Isle of Man Family History Society Journal, July 1896). Vermont, however, was one of only two states that had voted Whig in every presidential contest from 1836 to 1852, David Potter has pointed out. The burst of immigration in the late 1840s and early ’50s seriously disrupted American life because so many people came from a single country, so many were poor, and they were To Battle with a “Two-Edged Sword” 97 overwhelmingly Catholics stepping into a Protestant society. “It was in the midst of serious tensions, therefore, that the immigrant Irish began their participation in American political life. One of the earliest steps . . . was choosing between the Whigs and the Democrats” As time told, the Irish became “unswervingly Democratic” (D. Potter 1976, pp. 241–243, 436). In his newspaper, Cain pressed the Irish to naturalize and explained the process of citizenship involved. In 1864 he ran a column headlined, “Who Are Citizens” (Rutland Courier, June 3, 1864). In the 1840s, white males had almost universally acquired the right to vote in the United States; curbs on voting by Catholics were dropped; and in some places even white men who had not yet become naturalized citizens were allowed to vote. Two states retained property qualifications for voting, but they had disappeared by 1856 (Browne n.d.). By then, David Montgomery argued, “A man’s wage contract had taken its place alongside property ownership and race as a badge of participation in the polity” (1993, p. 22). As editor, Cain sided with the Irish workmen in labor disputes with marble owners. He criticized the administration’s efforts in prosecuting the Civil War, even though Vermonters had greatly supported Abraham Lincoln at the time of and after his inauguration (Vermont Civil War website ). As the war dragged on, Cain was especially harsh on Lincoln and the Republicans: “That this incompetent Administration will very soon again call for more men as food for gunpowder, and more money to squander on partisans, to secure Abraham’s reelection, no man who watched the slaughter of our armies for the last two months, can doubt. . . . We leave the Democracy of other towns to take such measure as they best can, to evade being forced into our armies and to decide ‘ways and means’ to avoid being forced to risk their lives for the equality and the superiority of the ‘Honorable gentleman from Africa’” (Rutland Courier, June 24, 1864). The Irish had not elected Lincoln; he drew votes from Protestant immigrants but got few from the Irish and German Catholics. It was the natives who delivered the presidency to him (D. Potter 1976, pp. 435–436). Protesting the Conscription Act of 1863 The Lincoln administration’s war policies did not rankle Cain alone. Rutland was one of a handful of places around the country that erupted...