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.
 

XXIV

"Pig Iron" Kelley by any other measure would have had no business to do with actually going to Alabama. A Pennsylvania abolitionist and Radical Republican congressman, he detested the Democratic Party and was an impassioned advocate of the freedman. Ostensibly that's why came to Limestone County by the cars from Philadelphia - to observe the negro's condition. He would do so in an extravagant junket trailed by a bootlicking political entourage that lazily made its way south like a caravan of Mughals. As it were, he met with The Major, Bonwit Vrooman, at the Nickajack Hotel to discuss the future of the Freedman's Bureau. Pig Iron wore a tweed frock coat of pedestrian make that contrasted with The Major's fine Italian linen suit and Chinese silk cravat. So it was that the congressman was such a zealous protectionist that he only bought American-made. The niceties were rushed. The congressman was a busy man.

I don't need to tell you that your little cabal here is f****d, Bonwit. The Major was taken aback. Kelley lit a monstrous cigar and exhaled a nimbus of smoke. You know what's going in Washington? Congress is about the defund the Freedman's Bureau. Nobody wants coloreds on the government teat anymore. You've done great work here, Bonwit. But I'm afraid the curtain is closing on your little show. I get the long face. You've got a lot invested here. Well that's why I've come. We're here to lift up the negro. Luckily that can still be a profitable enterprise for the both of us.
The Major was listening. Kelley continued.

 
He explained how millions in railroad bonds were being issued to rebuild the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which was still damaged from the war. Specifically, only a train ferry then existed linking the M&C between Decatur and Limestone County across the Tennessee River. The original stone pier railroad bridge had been burned down by the Yankees in '62. Construction of the bridge was going to take three years. The bonds themselves were backed by the Alabama state coffers, which cut the Republican governor into the deal, William Hugh Smith. They were solicited out to Northern investors by the Lehman Brothers, Henry and Emanuel, who were Jewish cotton brokers in Montgomery with shady Wall Street connections. The public offering was a stunning success for Radical Republicans who promised vast employment for the tens of thousands of freedman looking for better wages and freedom of movement that railroad work entailed.

 
Governor William "Skedaddle" Smith grew rich off the bond deal. He was Alabama's first of only two Republican governors before Guy Hunt was elected in a landslide over 110 years later. Both of these governors, the other being David "Beechnut" Lewis, had deep connections to the Nickajack Unionism movement during the war. Smith was sneered at as Skedaddle because he fled to Union lines when we couldn't get elected the Confederate Congress. He spent the rest of the war in Huntsville, Ala. recruiting Unionists across the Nickajack into the 1st Alabama Cavalry (US) without doing any actual fighting himself.

 
"Pig Iron" Kelley explained he represented a Consortium of investors - good Party men like yourself, he added. This Consortium owned the management company Huntsville Railroad Corporation, each investor holding a 1% stake in the entity. These investors included bankers, politicians, generals, and industrialists affiliated with the Republican establishment - all good Party men like yourself, he said again. We hold the contract for the new railroad bridge over the Tennessee River at Decatur. We need your labor. And now that the Freedman's Bureau is about to get defunded, you could use the money to keep up the good work you're doing down here. The HRC can give you 20% margin on your labor, but mind you this will be paid all up front.

 
What Pig Iron did not explain was the the HRC was just a post office box at the Huntsville Depot. A check for $4,000,000 (less "loan costs") payable to the Memphis & Charleston was written out by Lehman Brothers which had underwritten the bond sale. The check arrived at the Eastern Division headquarters of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which had only one employee at Huntsville Depot and whose only purpose was to deposit the check and subsequently draw a cashier's check for $4,000,000 on the bridge contract, payable to the HRC.

An accountant from Huntsville named Asher Applebaum arrived later to collect the check, who was the bookkeeper for HRC, which had no employees at all. He deposited the check at the National Bank of Huntsville, which was a great temple of money overlooking the Big Spring. Then at the desk of the bank president spent all $4,000,000 within the space of half an hour. Cashier checks were drafted for stockholder dividends and overbid subcontracts controlled by Consortium interests. When this was done, he closed the bank account and prepared financial statements showing a 15% profit margin for the investors, who had already cashed their dividend checks. Then the Consortium took the company public and dumped the stock on the back of a bogus prospectus. The deal was so clean that everyone from the governor on down thought to try it again to build the railroad from Chattanooga to Birmingham. And so later they did, nearly bankrupting the state.

 
The Major always thought himself a good Party man. What if they cut him in on the Huntsville Railroad Corporation someday? So he took the deal and four months later the Democrats indeed shut down the spigots from Washington. But since the Freedman's Bureau still technically existed, it had only one office left open in the waning years of existence, which was on Pryor Street in Athens. Asher Applebaum was hired to manage its manage its finances, for it held several subcontracts for which The Major held interests. And the labor was paid fairly, as implored by Pig Iron Kelley, who indeed cared for the freedman's condition, as did The Major. Strangetown continued to boom even as the Freedman's Bureau withered on the vine of history.

William "Pig Iron" Kelley, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and Railroad Investor

 

XXIII

A delegation of Greeks waited patiently at the Athens Depot as the two o' clock train from Corinth arrived twenty minutes late. They included Dr. Licinius Prentiss, Luke Pryor and Branse Havelock. A telegraph from that penultimate Greek, George Smith Houston, had summoned them. He was by then arriving via a long circuitous route. It took him from Montgomery, then west into and then north through Mississippi, and finally east from Corinth. It was an excruciating voyage in the heat of August, but it was the only way. As of yet, there was no railroad linking the Nickajack to the rest of the state. But all that was about to change. The train hove into the station chuffing steam from its brakes. A rather hefty man stepped off wearing a pair of polished balmorals and an ashen broadcloth suit. Most of the hair he had was hanging bosky from his chin. For the figure he cut, he was surprisingly deft on his feet.

 
George "Bourbon Smith" Houston was a tower of Alabama politics even before the war. He had been a professional Democrat politician since the 30's. He had voted for both the Mexican War and for secession, then sat out both wars at home.. He purchased a substitute to avoid conscription, and then brokered the sale of cotton to the Union Army when the Yankees occupied Limestone County. He and the Greeks grew fat off this illicit trade deep in heart of the Confederacy, which increasingly demanded corn just to feed its citizens. Just then he had been milling about the halls of power in Montgomery. He had been working over his well-aged system of patronage, which he cynically called "The Swamp." Principally, he had been whipping up furor against the Governor of Alabama, David P. Lewis, who was a Republican from Huntsville and nicknamed "Beechnut."

 
He looked for supplicants and found them grouped together near the platform, Dr. Prentiss foremost. The party chairman for the County stepped forward very formally to greet his master. George Houston brushed by him as though heading to the horizon, and spoke without greeting or shaking hands. The other Greeks fell in behind.

What the hell is going on here, Licinius, George blurted? I leave for a year in Montgomery trying to drum up support for my gubernatorial campaign, and then I find out we elect a black sheriff in my own backyard!?

Actually, he's white. But yes, he's a Republican. Its Bill Marmaduke.

Bourbon Smith sighed a breathe of relief. Thanks god he's white. But Bill Marmaduke? Goddam, he's popular. A real war hero. He could be a worse threat than Beechnut Lewis. You know what this means? I'm in danger of losing this County at the polls.

 
Indeed we are, said Dr. Prentiss. Strangetown is filling with negroes and white trash, and the Republicans are registering them like a machine. We successfully collapsed the voting precincts to a single registration point here in Athens, but they are just bussing them in from the rural precincts.

 
It was true. A black freeman and carpetbagger named Bartholomew "Barry" Hogan had assumed chairmanship of the Limestone County Republican Party. His credentials were shady, having arrived from Illinois. He was part of the powerful Republican establishment of that state, He was notable for being an influential colored delegate to the 1860 Republican Convention in Chicago that nominated Mr. Lincoln. He arrived in Strangetown and established a headquarters in a front on Strange Street. He got to work by festooning wagons with patriotic bunting. Then he would range them across the county, promising sweets and liquor to bring the formerly disenfranchised into Athens for registration. As if to reinforce the public trust, he passed out slips of paper inscribed with the Fifteenth Amendment that most of the freedman and poor whites couldn't even read.

 
Dr. Prentiss recited figures. Republicans turned out in record numbers. The Democrats got clobbered at the polls. When he had finished, he looked pale. Bourbon Smith had ceased walking and was glaring into Dr. Prentiss's face.

 
You’re the Chairman of the Democratic Party of Limestone County. I don't think you appreciate, Licinius, how critical the Nickajack has become to the future of Alabama. It has come down to me and a Huntsville scalawag - a Whig. The political compass of this state has swung North, and we are caught in this critical moment, Licinius. Do we hold onto what we have left of our way of life, or do we fold to a rabble of n*****s and illiterate crackers? Get your ship in order. Figure something out. Put your brains together, Licinius. I left you in charge for a reason!

 
The Klan sir?

 
Out of the question, barked Bourbon Smith. Jimmy Sloss is already on my ass about keeping them off the railroad he's building across the mountains from Decatur. He needs the colored labor. This is bigger than you think, Licinius. He's one of my largest donors, and he's in competition to get to Birmingham first with his railroad before the Yankees do.

 
That was also true. A Republican congressman from Pennsylvania named William "Pig Iron" Kelley was part of a cabal of Radical Republican investors who were racing Jimmy Sloss's railroad to Birmingham. Their railroad was being built from Chattanooga down the Wills Valley, which was flanked by Sand and Lookout Mountains. The A&C Railroad was backed by millions in government-backed bonds approved by the last Republican governor of Alabama, William Hugh Smith, which were corruptly solicited in excess of legal limits.

 
Sir, interjected Branse, who stepped in beside Dr. Prentiss, who was sweating visibly now. I think I may have an idea.

 
Smith warmed. Branse, I knew your father. He was a good friend of mine. He was definitely committed to the Cause. Some say more, he added cryptically. Branse nodded.

 
Mr. Houston, I don't think we need to sidestep the Klan just offhandedly. They may serve one more purpose for us yet.

 
The last thing we need is for President Grant to send in the army again to quell violence at the polls. The Radical Republicans are already lashing out at us for suppressing the vote with these registration ordinances. It's not ideal, but it is all we have. I know you'll work something out, Licinius, he said turning to the doctor again.

 
Sir, if I may, pressed Branse. You may leave it to me to handle the Klan when the time is right. We'll clean up your backyard before election.