XLVI

The Molly MacGuires had come to the Nickajack by way of the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad, and the prospect of good paying jobs in the coal mines that were being opened up in Birmingham. These were rough gangs of Irish who had been hustled off the boats off the East River Docks in New York by Boss William Tweed. They were given a hot meal and told to vote Democrat, then they were signed on to a coal mining company in Pennsylvania controlled by Tammany Hall cronies. During the war, Boss Tweed was signing these same bereft Irish into the Union Army. Little had changed since. The Irish were still coming off the boats in droves, and they were told to sign here for a Square Deal somewhere in the ferment of post-war America. Tens of thousands ended up in the mines of Pennsylvania where their Democratic voting bloc proved a headache for "Pig Iron" Kelly, a powerful House Committee chairman and Radical Republican.

The origins of this Irish phenomenon known as the Molly MacGuires are clouded in mystery, but certainly stem from the bond of poverty and resistance of the Old Country which characterizes every Irish-American immigrant. Dozens of such Irish gangs existed in Boston and New York, and their strange Celtic rituals migrated inland everywhere from the meatpackers of the Midwest to the coal mines of the Alleghenies. Each were familiar with each other by way of ties with the Old Country, though the Molly MacGuires tended to have origins in County Kerry. 

Meanwhile, Pig Iron represented the Southern concerns of the Consortium, which was a cabal of Radical Republicans who were as corrupt as the day was long. One project he was exceptionally proud of was the Huntsville Railroad Corporation, which bilked the government for millions on overbid contracts to build a new bridge across the Tennessee River at Decatur. Now the Consortium had purchased a controlling stake in the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad, which was then racing Jimmy Sloss's L&N railroad from Decatur toward the newly founded settlement of Birmingham. The Molly MacGuires came to the Nickajack from Pennsylvania at the behest of Frank O'Brien, an influential Irish land speculator in that promising new settlement. They called him "Billfold" O'Brien on account of his mysterious wealth. He was also an ally of Jimmy Sloss, who was building his own competing railroad from Decatur south to that Birmingham.  Many of these railroad investors included Greeks like Bourbon George Houston, who was then running for Governor of Alabama.  

Through those ancient and mystic cords that seem to bind the bereft Irish race together the world over, Billfold O'Brien beckoned the Molly MacGuires. And they tumbled down South along the railroad like so many gypsies. The honest ones were finding work in the mines they were beginning to bore through Red Mountain like so many dwarves in a subterranean fantasy of cursed toil. The more pragmatic ones took to the usual racketeering among their own race, but there was more than that.  O'Brien set them to harassing the Consortium railroad interests in the Nickajack.  They plagued Pig Iron Kelly's machinations by roughing up the Alabama & Chattanooga railroad crews, and sticking up trains on the Memphis & Charleston. They were a plague on the Consortium's interests, and an embarrassment to the Radical Republicans.

Congressman Benjamin "Spoons" Butler, who was Pig Iron Kelly's boss in the Consortium and on Capitol Hill, was livid over sagging profits. Moreover there was this influx of Irish cockroaches flooding into Birmingham and the Nickajack. They were buoying the already anemic Democrat base in Alabama, and threatening the Republican hold on the Alabama governorship. In a secret meeting with Senator "Parson" Brownlow of Tennessee and Pig Iron Kelly, Spoons Butler orbited his desk a dozen times while reciting a litany of bitching. Spoons Butler was a figure to behold. He was so corrupt, he had two pejorative nicknames - "Spoons," on account of his habit of purloining silverware, and "Beast," on account of the rough and indignant manner he treated sesech women during the war.  He had hound dog eyes and sagging jowls. The swale of his gut sloped away from his chest to where he could not see his small feet. No matter. He spoke with his hands, which were also unusually small.  Little was this detail noticed, however, on account of the enormous dome of head which was speckled and repulsively matte. A tonsure of long hair, however, seemed to rebel at the encroaching desiccation of his skull, and it looked seldom washed. He could have worn a toupee, but he was naturally uncouth about his appearance.  His power, influence and ego spoke for themselves. 

These goddam Micks are a real burr in our ass, you know.  Parson?  What about your man, The Melungeon? What can he do about this?  

Parson replied.  He had blue marble eyes and sunken cheeks like the late Mr. Lincoln.  His mouth was wide and curled downward at the ends.  These Molly MacGuires, they're mostly operating out of Huntsville and Chattanooga. He said The Melungeon could clean the Molly MacGuires off the Memphis & Charleston tracks, but the Chattanooga to Birmingham Railroad was beyond what the Melungeon could manage.

I'll work on that, Spoons Butler spat.  I've got negroes in Chattanooga that can work the railroad to Birmingham, but you just get The Melungeon to work on the Irish in Huntsville.  Parson Brownlow nodded.  

As for you! Spoons Butler pointed his child-like finger at Pig Iron Kelly.  This Credit Mobilier scandal is getting out of hand and could blow open the whole circus tent.  I think we can put a lid on this, but this Huntsville Railroad Corporation. We can't have that dangling as a loose end.  I want you find a way to tie that up. There's an accountant somewhere who knows too much.  Find him.  He's probably Jewish.  So he was.  His name was Asher Applebaum, and he was now the accountant for The Major in Athens.  But for now the Molly MacGuires were the priority. No one expected violence from a Jewish accountant, but from an Democrat Irishman with a knife?  This was more than what any of these men bargained for sinking their interests in the Deep South.  

XXVIII

In the years of Reconstruction, the fate of the Nickajack rested more than on just a rabble of freedman and poor white trash in Strangetown. Great forces were gathering to fill the commercial and political vacuum of a devastated South, specifically Republican forces. The Democrats were on the defensive. Thus as of yet they had no allies among the old War Democrats. But things were more complex in the Nickajack.

The Yankees occupied much of the old cotton growing region for most of the war. While the Democrats of South Alabama had been effectively disenfranchised by "Iron Clad" oaths, most Democrats of the Nickajack could still take this oath swearing they had not born arms against the Union, hiring substitutes not withstanding. Indeed, the planter-class of Democrats known as the "Greeks" survived the political revolution brought on by outright conquest. They avoided subjugation by having collaborated with the Yankee power. Even in the midst of a great conflict that emancipated millions from human bondage, they continued to sell slave-picked cotton North even after the Emancipation Proclamation... at least until Abraham Stone won Guster Ledbetter's case for freedom.

The other political class that survived the war were the old "Whig" Democrats. The Whig Party was a defunct national party that believed in a strong federal government emphasizing legislative power. The party platform was popular with burghers and yeoman yearning to bring their goods to a growing American market. They believed in internal improvements and high tariffs to support domestic industry. They had sent four Presidents to the White House before the slavery question destroyed the party. The Whigs had split, with the Northern Whigs finding embrace with the new Republican Party, and the Southern Whigs representing a class of 'moderates' in the Democratic Party. So strong were these old Whig sentiments among both parties that the 1860 Presidential election was split four ways, ushering the most unlikely political creature imaginable into the White House, Mr. Abraham Lincoln. Most Southern Whigs opposed secession, but enlisted in droves after Fort Sumter. When all those enthusiastic patriots had been killed, conscription started rounding up the rest.

However they may have survived, the class of Whig Democrats had been devastated by the war. Most of them could not afford substitutes, so they ended up fighting... and dying. Their properties were confiscated for taxes in arrears when they never came home. Their families were left destitute. What few slaves they may have had walked off to work on (marginally) better plantation contracts brokered by corrupt Union officers out to the Greeks. There was enormous resentment amongst the Whigs against the Greeks despite being of the same political party. So great was this scorn that many of these Southern Whigs had turned to the Republican Party after the war - "Scalawags."

Huntsville, Alabama was full of Republican Scalawags. They had even put one of their own into office, William Hugh "Skedaddle" Smith. Like most Huntsvillians these days, he wasn't even a native. He was a lawyer from Randolph County where he had studied law beneath a tree under the tutelage of Robert Stell Heflin. patriarch of a great Alabama political dynasty that has lasted more than 150 years. They remained close political allies, having stumped the South for Stephen Douglas for the 1860 election that swept Mr. Lincoln into office. They were passionate opponents of secession.

The Governor was scorned as "Skedaddle" by the Democrats. He had been one of their own. He may have been a Whig, but he was a slaveholder. That's what this war was all about, wasn't it? Though he voted against secession he ran anyway for the new Confederate Congress. Harangued out of the campaign by the fire-eating Montgomery press, he fled into Yankee lines. He skedaddled, and took roost in Huntsville, Ala., which was a hotbed of Union sentiment. There were Greeks in Huntsville too, like the Steeles and the Pope-Walkers, who had close kinship with the Limestone County Greeks.

Bill Smith cast his lot with the Yankees early as a very different collaborator from the Greeks. He spent the war raising up the pro-Union 1st Alabama Cavalry (US) in Madison County. The 1st Ala. (US) clashed with Frank Gurley and Bill Marmaduke in the mountains of Madison and Jackson Counties. So renowned had this unit become that General Sherman personally requested it to escort his horde of Yankees in its March to the Sea. Not willing to be left out of a good junket, he rode with Sherman's headquarters as it burned and looted its way from Atlanta to Savannah. It earned him the permanent enmity of the Greeks.

After the war and for his loyalty, he had found himself neatly tucked in at the Southern terminus of a Republican patronage system that radiated from the District of Columbia like a rotten fistula. The Greeks were aghast that Skedaddle Smith had eminently powerful political allies like "Pig Iron" Kelley and "Spoons" Butler. These were men roundly hated throughout the South as abolitionists. They were Radical Republicans who had nothing short of an agenda of radical social engineering of the defeated South, and they played Skeddadle Smith like a pawn in their plans. They were also all crooked as a barrell of fish hooks.

Skedaddle Smith was swept into power on passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. To ensure his election and inauguration, General Grant had sent the army in. When he settled into the Governor's mansion, he repaid his Radical Republican masters in kind by authorizing the sale of railroad bonds backed by the state coffers to rebuild the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The bonds were solicited to investors by the Lehman Brothers of Montgomery for which Skedaddle Smith took a tidy cut. The proceeds of these bonds were used to pay overbid contracts on repairs to the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The contractors, which included the Huntsville Railroad Corporation, were controlled by a Consortium of Radical Republican opportunists that included Pig Iron Kelley and Spoons Butler.

So spectacular did this scheme work that Skedaddle Smith thought to do it again! Without legislative authorization, he authorized the issuance of millions more in state-backed bonds to help build the railroad from Chattanooga to newly founded Birmingham. The railroad in question was the Alabama & Chattanooga, which was being laid down the Wills Valley between Sand and Lookout Mountains. Coincidentally, both the Governor and Pig Iron Kelley sat on the Board of Directors. Even Spoons Butler was a major stakeholder. And so the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad reached Birmingham first, beating Jimmy "The Colonel" Sloss's railroad from Decatur.

The Republicans were raking in the cash. Special couriers - good Party men - shuttled between Montgomery and Washington with bags of specie in what Spoons Butler called his Underground Railroad. But once the railroad was constructed, problems grew quickly about how to actually run it. Gangs of Irish thugs called the Molly Maguires mysteriously began to attack the newly opened railroad up and down the Wills Valley. Profits faltered, then collapsed altogether. When the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad defaulted on its interest payments, the states finances couldn't be more red. Now the Democrats had Governor Smith right where they wanted him... pinned as a Yankee collaborator and sheisty as politician could get.

But nothing was quite so shocking to the Consortium's commercial interests in Alabama as the story broken by the New York Sun on the Credit Mobilier scandal. Here was something that could destroy the Republican Party. It was corruption on a vast scale. It spanned the breadth of the continent... literally, for it involved overbid contracts and management abuse on the transcontinental railroad. Pig Iron Kelley was hauled before Congress. Here was a passionate abolitionist, a founder of the Republican Party, and now standing accused of unscrupulous corruption. As the investigation progressed, it was decided that some loose ends needed tying up.

The prototype for Credit Mobilier was the Huntsville Railroad Corporation and its obscenely expensive contract to rebuild the Tennessee River bridge from Limestone County to Decatur. It had been financed by the first round of state-backed railroad bonds authorized by Governor Smith. Somewhere in the records of this company, which had no office or employees, were names of the one-hundred shareholders of the Huntsville Railroad Corporation, now being solicited by the Lehman Brothers as an initial public offering with the ticker HRC.

And so it was passed down from the Consortium its desire to see this party shut down. It didn't care how. The Consortium was already at work cleaning up the loose ends on Credit Mobilier. They needed someone in the Nickajack to clean up the loose ends in Huntsville. So they called upon one of their own, William "Parson" Brownlow. Parson, who was by then Tennessee's Senator, had a man on the scene.

And so a telegraph went out down the wires from Nashville to the Western Union in Athens where this man sat stood waiting with a bowler in his hand. His query to Nashville was coded so as not to alarm the telegraph operator. How do you like your soup? With tongue or tail? The telegraph paused, as though in thought. Then the telegraph sounder began to tap and rattle. The telegrapher passed the message to the Melungeon. He took out his reading glasses and read what it said.

Tongue.
 

William "Parson" Brownlow, Radical Republican Governor of Tennessee

 

XXII

The man they called The Melungeon was a short, wiry ruffian. His skin was a leathery brown, and his long walrus mustache curled around his sunken dimples. He was one of William G. Brownlow's men, the Radical Republican governor of Tennessee. They nicknamed the governor "The Parson." Born Simon Mise, he fought as a staunch Unionist in the guerilla war that swept East Tennessee during the rebellion. He and his band ranged up and down the Cumberland Plateau from the Nickajack to the Cumberland Gap burning bridges and ambushing Confederate patrols. Towards the end of the war Bill Brownlow, probably the most hated man in the Confederacy besides Mr. Lincoln, was swept into the governorship of Tennessee. Ex-Confederates were barred from voting, so only Tennessee Unionists were polled. He replaced his political rival, the military governor and Unionist Democrat Andrew Johnson, who in three months would became President upon Mr. Lincoln's assassination.

When The Parson moved into the governor's mansion in Nashville, disenfranchised whites who fought for the Confederacy were appalled. They were unable to vote without taking the "Ironclad Oat,h" avowing they had never voluntarily aided the rebellion. They were horror stricken when The Parson began to agitate for the black suffrage, saying a "loyal negro was more deserving that a disloyal white man." That's when the Ku Klux Klan was born and exploded across war-torn Tennessee with the celebrity of that devil Nathan Bedford Forrest in its ranks. Bill Brownlow had another insurgency on his hands, albeit one against his own power. For this irascible Radical Republican governor, vengeance against disloyal didn't end at Appomattox. He welcomed the insurgency to destroy his political foes in the Democratic party, whether they had been Unionist or not.

So The Melungeon earned his reputation of busting heads at the Tennessee ballot boxes for the Republican Party, and crashing Klan rallies with a pistol whip and shillelagh. He was part of the Brownlow patronage system that dominated post-war Tennessee. But a love of Union didn't prevent this Republican from lining his own pockets in the pursuit of vendetta. The L&N Railroad, while under Yankee occupation for much of the war, was under the influence of a cabal of old Whigs investors. They all had pre-war connections between both North and South dating back to the Fillmore administration, James Withers Sloss being notable among them.

The Parson's rub was that the thousands of negroes he held in thrall with the voting franchise could not find enough opportunity in war-ravaged Tennessee. They crowded into freedman camps where they worked pitiable wages on annual plantation contracts negotiated by corrupt Republican authorities. But down south in Limestone County they'd heard up the grapevine that a place called Strangetown was bursting at the seams with work and opportunity. So they started packing up and train hopping their way south towards the Nickajack where they found work on Jimmy Sloss's railroad to Birmingham. Bill Brownlow was bleeding the black vote his party's power depended on as it migrated South to help close the last frontier of Alabama. And the Melungeon followed in their wake, chasing freedman who fled their plantation contracts in Tennessee. It landed he and his gang, the Crab Orchard Boys, in Limestone County where one of America's forgotten post-war frontiers was throbbing with opportunity, and riches. It was an irresistible temptation to the Melungeon.