On April 15, 1861, President Lincoln called for 75,000 militia to subdue an insurrection by “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law.” That same day Secretary of War Simon Cameron issued a “Call to Arms” for volunteers, assigning to each state a quota of men “to serve…for three months, or sooner, if discharged.” This step would not get the job done. Lincoln would need many more men and much more time.
Almost immediately Lincoln called for more volunteers and extended their term of service. On July 17, 1862, he signed the draft act. In October conscription began. In Schuylkill County, in Pennsylvania’s coal mining region, conscription was met with violent opposition; opposition “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
The Oct. 29 North Branch Democrat in Tunkhannock reported that “troubles growing out of the draft are assuming a formidable aspect. Over five thousand miners and colliers have armed themselves, and are showing a
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disposition to make desperate resistance….” The rioters were armed with “iron bludgeons, swords, and every other variety of weapon.” A train carrying conscripts to Harrisburg was blocked by these well-armed miners, and “the men within were invited to step into the road, where they were assured that all attempts to coerce them to serve…would be unavailing.”
This report came a week after a communication from Pennsylvania’s governor, Andrew Curtin, to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Curtin advised Stanton that “1,000 armed men are assembled, and will not suffer the train to move with the drafted men to [Harrisburg].” Curtin requested authority to use troops, “particularly the regulars and Anderson Cavalry at Carlisle, to crush this effort instantly.” Within hours Stanton replied, giving Curtin all he asked for and more. On Oct. 25 Curtin wrote Stanton that “the riots have ceased for the present.” On Oct. 28 the Pittsburgh Post reported that “attempts at armed resistance to the draft in Schuylkill county [sic] have failed, and the excitement has entirely subsided.” The reasons, said the Post, were the prompt display of military force and an appeal to the (mostly Irish) miners by the Catholic bishop of Philadelphia. So, even before readers in Tunkhannock learned of the
inscriptions express a riot 80 miles to the south, the trouble had passed, quelled by a combination of earthly and heavenly power.
Were these the reasons the miners quieted down? Did the miners actually submit to government authority? To answer these questions we turn to an account written 43 years later by Alexander McClure, the draft commissioner for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
McClure was editor of the Franklin Repository and a prominent Republican politician. When his service in the Pennsylvania Senate ended in 1861 he intended to leave public life and devote his energies to his business; however, Governor Curtin and President Lincoln prevailed on him to accept this tough job. McClure selected local draft commissioners with great care. He needed strong and independent men, men who could fairly enforce the draft and withstand the inevitable political pressure applied by “the small politicians of each county” who would seek “the discharge of conscripts where it would serve political ends.” In Schuylkill County he picked Benjamin Bannan, also a newspaperman, the editor of the Miners’ Journal in Pottsville, the county seat.
In his 1905 account McClure described the situation.
“It is due to the truth of history to say that at that time there was not a dominating public spirit in Pennsylvania that heartily supported the war.” This was especially true in some of the mining districts, where “there were positive indications of revolutionary disloyalty, and it was especially manifested in Schuylkill, where the Molly Maguires were in the zenith of their power. The center of their power was in Cass Township, where thirteen murders had been committed within two or three years, and not a single murderer brought to punishment.”
Executing the draft in this region would be “a task of appalling magnitude.”
Schuylkill County produced nowhere near the number of volunteers needed to meet its quota for the army, so “an unusually large quota was officially returned to Commissioner Bannan with directions to fill the same with conscripts….” The list of drafted men included a large number of miners, “all of whom were under the absolute influence of the Molly Maguires.”
When the miners refused to report and blocked the train carrying willing conscripts, Bannan reported the facts to McClure, who immediately reported them to the Secretary of War.
“Stanton was strenuously loyal,” wrote McClure, “and at times impetuous when confronted with open disregard of law.” Stanton ordered two regiments to the troubled county “to be subject to [McClure’s] orders to enforce the draft at the point of the bayonet.”
McClure, less impetuous than Stanton, consulted with Governor Curtin. The editor/politician/ pragmatist “urged that a conflict between our own troops and rioters…would be most disastrous in its consequences, not only at home, but throughout the country….” McClure advised Stanton that “haste should be avoided in forcing a conflict between the troops and the…insurgents.” Stanton “promptly answered by repeating his order that the regiments should be started at once… and that the draft be enforced without parleying.”
McClure and Curtin (who by now was in agreement with McClure’s cautious approach) went over Stanton’s head. The commissioner sent a cyphered dispatch to the president “giving the Governor’s views on the peril of provoking a conflict…and asked for an early answer.”
Lincoln also was less impetuous than his Secretary of War. He sent an emissary to Harrisburg who met McClure in his hotel the next morning. This emissary delivered a “personal message” from the president. McClure wrote that he “informed me that [the president] was desirous, of course, to see the law executed, or at least appear to be executed….” The messenger added that the Lincoln had said “I think McClure will understand.” McClure sent for Bannan, who arrived by train shortly after noon. The two then met with Governor Curtin.
“Lincoln’s message was well understood,” wrote McClure. “Bannan was most desirous for a peaceful solution…and he said that the draft could not be executed in Cass Township without a bloody conflict with the Molly Maguires.” Furthermore, Bannan “could conceive of no method by which there could be given the appearance of executing the law.”
McClure had a creative idea. Some districts of the state “had shown conclusively that their quota had been entirely filled with volunteers, some of whom had enlisted in county towns or cities and had not been properly credited to the township as the law required.” In these cases, said McClure, he had “at once revoked the order for the draft,” and, he added, “that only in that way could the Cass Township problem be solved, if it were practicable.”
Bannan took the hint. He “made no reply, but took his hat, hastened to the train, and reached Pottsville that evening. On the following evening he was back in Harrisburg, with a large number of affidavits regularly executed by a justice of the peace or notary, proving on their face that the quota for Cass Township had been filled by volunteers.”
It had been suddenly discovered that numerous men from Cass had voluntarily enlisted elsewhere, in towns where regiments or companies were being organized. These men, moved by patriotic fervor, had simply forgotten to tell the recruiters that they hailed from patriotic Cass Township in patriotic Schuylkill County. These men just forgot, and no one noticed their oversight until the day Curtin, Bannan, and McClure met in Harrisburg.
“One war at a time,” Lincoln once said in another context. The United States was busy enough fighting the Confederacy, and in October 1862, it was deemed best not to take on the Irish miners in Schuylkill County. No one involved was so indiscrete as to ask how Bannan managed to get all the affidavits so fast, and the law appeared to have been executed.
Sources: The newspapers cited in this column can be found at Valley of the Shadow archive (http://valley.lib. virginia.edu/ and at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive (https://panewsarchive.psu.edu/). Alexander McClure’s account is found in his 1905 book, Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania: A Connected and Chronological Record of the Commercial, Industrial and Educational Advancement of Pennsylvania, and the Inner History of All Political Movements Since the Adoption of the Constitution of 1838, Vol. 1. John C. Winston Company, Philadelphia.