Bold Sons of Erin (50 page)

The staff of the Historical Society of Schuylkill County proved wonderfully helpful, even on short notice, and did all a
researcher could ask. The society’s director, Dr. Peter Yasenchak, serves his community very well, indeed, and special thanks go to the county’s “walking encyclopedia,” Leo Ward, the society’s president and the author of the valuable paper “Unrest: Civil War Draft Resistance.” Tom Dempsey also offered important insights, and both Jean Dellock and Karen Gibson went out of their way to assist me. All of the staff of the Historical Society are justifiably proud of their home and heritage. Now housed in a fine old building on Pottsville’s Centre Street, the society has a great deal to offer the scholar, casual historian and tourist alike (then cross the street to Beauregard’s for the best lunch in the coal regions).

I must stress, however, that the views implicit and explicit in
Bold Sons of Erin
are strictly my own and should not be blamed on the staff of the Historical Society or on anyone else who assisted me. Doubtless, some would argue with my take on history—I call it as I see it, and that’s that. As a Schuylkill County native during my formative years (when the natives were restless, indeed), I drank deep of the historical currents that have never ceased flowing between those hills and coal banks. Later experience as a soldier and an intelligence officer gave me useful tools to approach historical records with a healthy skepticism, but the interpretation of history in a region so fraught with struggle as the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania remains a matter more contentious than politics. It is, literally, in the blood.

When Faulkner commented to the effect that, in the South, the past wasn’t even past, he might have been speaking of Schuylkill County. Indeed, in the sense of living with the omnipresence of history, the county seems to me the most “Southern” territory in the states that fought for the Union in our Civil War. The past is certainly present in the abandoned mines and colliery-spoiled hills, in the waste banks half-disguised with birches now and in the architectural remnants of King Coal’s glory days. But these are merely things. The past lives on vitally in the ethnic communities of the coal towns and
in the combativeness so many residents still feel over events that happened well over a century ago.

The legacies of early capitalism, of nascent unions and great strikes, of buccaneer coal barons, powerful railways and fortunes made and lost on the backs of miners in the world’s richest veins of anthracite . . . as vivid as all that remains to those of us who were born with coal dust in our blood, the great, inextinguishable debate is over the Molly Maguires. Did they even exist? I do not doubt it. Were they murderers? Some of them were, beyond dispute. Did they deserve to hang? Some did, but others appear to have been railroaded—an especially appropriate term, given the career of their chief antagonist, Franklin B. Gowen. What about John Kehoe, the alleged ringleader of the Mollies, hanged by one governor, then pardoned a century later by another? It appears that he was guilty of doing all he could to better the lot of his Irish brethren, but his hanging looks to have been more a matter of convenience than of justice. And what of Gowen himself, the “ruler of the Reading,” as one adoring biographer dubbed him? I think my views are revealed clearly enough in the pages of this novel.

There is, of course, much more. Among other subjects, this novel deals with the formative days of the Mollies, when the Irish were divided between those who supported the Union war effort, hoping to win acceptance with their blood, and those who wanted only to work and earn a living wage and who did not see a stake for themselves in that great conflict. I hope, one day, to write more about the Mollies, in the violent years after the war. Yet, I know that nothing I might write could please all parties.

As with all true partisans, the people who keep the past alive in Schuylkill County expect one to take sides, either vilifying the Molly Maguires, or viewing them as innocent freedom fighters—or simply as stage-managed victims. I believe the truth lies in between, as the truth so often does. But moderation is no more popular among the historically minded than it is among the avidly religious. I hope only that those who are not shackled
too snugly to the past may find in this novel a few insights into a history largely forgotten outside of the anthracite fields.

It is a remarkable history. Although the plot of this novel is a fiction, it is based, as closely as possible, on historical events. In the autumn of 1862 (and thereafter), the Irish miners of Schuylkill County simmered in near rebellion. They did, indeed, stop a troop train and remove several hundred recruits. They destroyed draft records and employed violence against registrars. The authorities were cowed, when not panicked. And the troubles blooming from Cass Township and centered on the mining patch of Heckschersville really did reach the ears of President Lincoln, who responded with the Solomonic message to Harrisburg reported in these pages.

If you go to Heckschersville today, following a county road through scarred coal lands, you will be welcomed first by an Irish flag painted on the side of a rock. The old company houses, neatly maintained, display no shortage of shamrocks and other symbols of the heritage of their inhabitants. The people combine the pride of the Irish with the tenacity of mining families, even though the mines have long been closed. The village is a quiet, unassuming place of diminished population now, and it is hard to believe that American labor history was made in its dusty streets, its mines, its colliery. But the ghosts are there, waiting for anyone with a sixth sense for history. I hope the people of Heckschersville, whose ancestors struggled for what they believed to be just, will not judge this book too harshly. They have much of which to be proud.

There are, as always in a work of fiction, some fabrications. One must be highlighted: I make it a rule never to use a real man of the cloth as a character in my novels. The priest, Father Wilde, is a purely fictional character, invented to feed the engine of the book’s plot and to embody specific issues of the period. In reality, the Reverend John Scanlon was the pastor of St. Kiaran’s (as it then was spelled) throughout the Civil War. He served the Catholic population of Heckschersville without blemish for a decade, until the status of the parish was elevated
in 1868. There is no historical scandal attached to St. Kiaran’s church.

For those who would like to learn more about the historical foundation of this novel, the following books seem to me the best with which to begin:

On the Molly Maguires, the reader cannot do better than Kevin Kenny’s superb, balanced
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires.
Of the many other works dealing with the Mollies, the late Arthur H. Lewis’s
Lament for the Molly Maguires
remains an old favorite of mine. For the true history buff, Allan Pinkerton’s dishonest and bigoted
The Mollie Maguires and the Detectives
is a hoot. Grace Palladino’s more recent
Another Civil War
draws its prejudices from the political left, but is well researched; it may be read for the facts presented, though the reader must suspect a number of its conclusions.

The development of anthracite mining in the nineteenth century is masterfully presented in
St. Clair,
by Antony F. C. Wallace. Examining the industry through the development of a single town in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, the author does a peerless job of re-creating a lost world. This is one of the finest works of scholarship I ever have encountered.

Irish folklore, history and sheer “Irishness” have given rise to a publishing industry all their own and there is no shortage of texts available, from the mawkish to the magnificent. I have been especially impressed by one recent book.
The Cooper’s Wife Is Missing,
by Joan Hoff and Marian Yeates, is harrowing, but illuminating reading. Anyone who takes exception to my portrayal of the persistence of old superstitions (beliefs with which I still contended as a child in the 1950s) should sit down with this book. Describing a gruesome murder “justified” on supernatural grounds in late-nineteenth-century Ireland, the book certainly makes the case that the old ways die hard (not only among the Irish, by any means).

Any writer who dares to describe a Civil War battle on the page must take the
War of the Rebellion, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
as his primary source, turning
thereafter to regimental histories, diaries and memoirs. Again, I believe that my own military career has enabled me to read those documents with a sharpened eye for self-justification, ambition and masked reality. The language changes, but not the character—or characters—of the soldier. Yet, every battle of that war also has inspired multiple modern works seeking to interpret events for those who lack the time or the inclination to plough through original sources. Regarding the Union debacle at Fredericksburg, I have been particularly impressed by George C. Rable’s
Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!
which is not only finely researched and well reasoned, but handsomely written, as well.

Finally, heartfelt thanks to all the readers who have followed Abel Jones on his adventures thus far. Without an audience, a writer is merely a noise unto himself.

I’M EXCITED ABOUT THE RE-PUBLICATION OF THE “BY Owen Parry” series of Civil War mysteries and am grateful to Stackpole Books for undertaking it. The novels featuring Abel Jones have attracted a cult of followers, and the most frequently asked questions I field as I travel and talk on other subjects are versions of “When’s the little Welshman coming back?” While I hope to add new books to the series in the future—after fulfilling other writing commitments—I’m glad Abel’s able to huff and puff and pontificate through these first six novels again. His character was always a joy to write.

Bold Sons of Erin
is the most war-torn of the novels in the series, bracketed by the battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg—at both of which the Irish Brigade distinguished itself by its phenomenal courage. But, then, was ever Irishman born who didn’t glory in combat of some kind, whether in war, or of wits, in literary duels, political campaigns or good old-fashioned brawls? I did my best to do homage to the micks in blue who did so much to save their adopted country—I do not think any soldiers ever were braver.

But there’s more to the novel, of course, including a plunge into superstition and darkness back in the troubled anthracite coal fields (where I would make my first appearance ninety years after 1862, the year in which this tale has been embedded). Even as a child in a largely secular, nominally Methodist
family in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, I was startled by the degree and depth of the superstitions that lived on among our neighbors in the coal patches, where the melting pot had barely begun to melt: The only nod to modernity was that believers never referred to witchcraft as “witchcraft,” but always with some euphemism. There were chants, charms, warnings, and one prediction that, born with a caul, I was bound for greatness—a prophecy counterbalanced by a Polish cleaning lady who, when not crossing herself at a thousand daily alarms, informed my mother that her new infant (yours truly) would prove malign and retarded (a charge with which any number of my past girlfriends would agree).

This is the grimmest book in the series thus far, and I suspect that some of the spirits haunting its pages were exorcised from the author’s own dark places. Does anything linger like the dreads of childhood?

This is a book best read on chill nights deep into October, with Halloween approaching.

—Ralph Peters, aka Owen Parry, March 3, 2012