Irish Filibusters and Know Nothings in Cincinnati

FALL 2010 3 Irish Filibusters and Know Nothings in Cincinnati Eileen Muccino G ordon’s Drug Store, situated at the corner of Eighth Street and Western Row in Cincinnati, was the site of a second floor meeting hall popular with Irish-American groups. On the evening of January 4, 1856, a U.S. marshal and fifty men, including deputies and volunteers , arrived with a federal warrant for the arrest of twenty members of the Robert Emmet Club, the local Irish Emigrant Aid Society. Their alleged crime was violation of the federal Neutrality Act of 1818, punishable by a fine and three years in prison. The men were accused of planning a military enterprise to Ireland and plotting to raise arms and recruit soldiers for war against England. Eight of those listed on the warrant were found at the hall and duly arrested. During the proceedings, Edward Kennifeck, one of the accused Irish-Americans, pulled a revolver and pointed it at the deputies. Apparently he feared an attack by Know Nothings, an anti-foreign and anti-Catholic secret society, from a nearby lodge.1 Perhaps he had cause. In the 1850s Irish Catholics and nativists clashed often at the ballot box, through the religious and partisan press, and sometimes in the city’s streets. On April 2, 1855, an election day, with both German and Irish voters leaning toward the Democratic ticket, the city exploded in violence. Antiimmigrant gangs tore through Over-the-Rhine, the German section of the city, stealing and destroying ballot boxes. Rioting spread to other German and Irish neighborhoods, with the nativists particularly anxious about armed German militias . In the summer of 1855 these combatants chose a different battleground— the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Ohio. Frustrated by political confusion and mired in long-standing rivalries, Irishmen and nativists provoked each other with accusations of violation of the Neutrality Act. The first occasion was the arrest in July 1855 of Charles Rowecroft, the British consul in Cincinnati, for the crime of illegal recruiting for his government’s army. Members of the Robert Emmett Club, who resented both local nativists and British officials, initiated the Charles Rowecroft (1798-1856), half-plate daguerreotype. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER IRISH FILIBUSTERS AND KNOW NOTHINGS IN CINCINNATI 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY charge. Several months later Know Nothing sympathizers infiltrated the Robert Emmett Club and facilitated the arrest of the Irishmen for violating the same federal law.2 Underlaying the strife were the activities of American filibusters, a new brand of adventurers who planned and sometimes carried out armed expeditions into foreign countries that had since 1851 drawn widespread attention. Filibusters led armed incursions into Mexico and Cuba, and in 1855 Tennessee-born William Walker seized control of the country of Nicaragua. Their motivations were varied : the belief that the United States was destined to spread democracy to countries mired in revolutionary turmoil; the drive for personal wealth; the expansion of the slave economy; and the desire to eliminate European influence in the western hemisphere. Federal officials sometimes found it politically convenient to overlook their activities, but the threat of involving the country in a foreign war was a serious problem. The general public became fascinated by the exploits of filibusters, whose activities were widely reported, and connected them with the Irish nationalist movement known as the Fenian Brotherhood then actively organizing Irish Americans’ support for armed rebellion in Ireland. For nativist white Cincinnatians, the Robert Emmet Club was nothing less than manifest subversion , an ethnic and religious filibuster in their midst, and they sought to arrest it by means lawful and not.3 Despite its distance from the eastern cities of the developing nation, Cincinnati was at the forefront of nativist campaigns against immigrants and political conflicts over ethnic issues. The design of these movements fluctuated over time owing to political expediency and the size and activities of specific ethnic groups, but targeting Irish Catholics remained popular with Cincinnati nativists. Such prejudice was often religiously based, with white Protestant Cincinnatians serving as leading members of nativist organizations. But it had a class element as well. By midcentury , the arrival of thousands of poor famine immigrants who soon became politically active...