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Blood Runs Green
The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago
By Gillian O'Brien The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-24900-1
CHAPTER 1
"CITY OF BIG SHOULDERS"
The Convergence of the Clan
That astonishing Chicago—a city where they are always rubbing the lamp and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new possibilities. Mark Twain
In the spring of 1873, a short, dapper man with "piercing and magnetic eyes" stepped off the train into the charred, scarred streets of Chicago. Dressed in his trademark black suit, complete with cowboy boots and pearl-handled pistol, Alexander Sullivan was trying to rebuild himself and his reputation, much like the city itself. Huge swaths of Chicago had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1871 that began at the back of DeKoven Street on the West Side, leapt the Chicago River, and traveled north as far as Fullerton Avenue in Lincoln Park. For a day and a half the fire had raged, and when it was over, little remained of the city center apart from the limestone Water Tower on Michigan Avenue (then Pine Street) and Mahlon D. Ogden's residence on West Walton Street. An estimated three hundred people had died, eighteen thousand buildings had been reduced to glowing embers, and almost a third of the city's population had lost their homes.
Faced with disaster, the citizens of Chicago rallied, and as soon as land was cleared of the smoking debris, new, bigger, better, taller buildings rose to replace the old. Despite the depression that gripped much of the United States in the early 1870s, by June 1873 the city was sufficiently resurgent to host a jubilee week to celebrate the rebuilding. Chicago began to rival and then to overtake the expansion of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia; within twenty years of the Great Fire, the city boasted the first skyscrapers and the fastest-growing population in the country.
For Sullivan, as for others arriving in Chicago in the aftermath of the Great Fire, the city was a place of opportunity, of hope, and of expectation. Every week thousands of young men and women clambered out of trains to seek their fortune in the bustling metropolis. As the trains slowed on the approach to the station the iconic sights and sounds that would define the city for several generations became clear. Emerging from the bustle and smoke and clamor of engines and bells in Union Depot, new Chicagoans caught their first glimpses of the "dingy houses, smoky mills, [and] tall elevators" that surrounded the station. Aside from Alexander Sullivan, 1873 also saw the arrival in Chicago of Albert Parsons and Louis Sullivan. Parsons's involvement with anarchists would culminate in a pivotal moment for the city and for labor history during the Haymarket Riot of 1886, while Louis Sullivan's buildings would come to define the Chicago of the late nineteenth century.
Alexander Sullivan was determined to make his mark too, and his appearance frequently attracted attention. Always clean-shaven and impeccably dressed in a black suit, he was a slim man with gray eyes and arresting facial features. One admiring contemporary observed that "his features have the delicacy of sculpture and indicate a refined, proud and sensitive nature" while in the "the frank and penetrating glance of his eyes is easily discerned a character of extraordinary mental capacity which is combined with courage, tact and persistence." Not everyone was so impressed. William O'Brien, a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, thought him "a liverish man, strong-browed and strong-jawed, about whose bloodless lips and sharp white teeth there played a certain pitilessness which all his softness of voice and studious airs of deference could not change to anything better than cold self- control." Wherever Sullivan went, opinion tended to be sharply divided, and he had become, of necessity, something of a master of reinvention. Between 1865 and 1895, he was variously a respectable businessman, the owner of a shoe store, a tax collector, a newspaper owner, a journalist, a city official, a postmaster, the leader of a secret revolutionary society, a lawyer, an abolitionist, a Republican, a Democrat, the president of the Irish National League of America, a gambler, and a murderer. America was the land of opportunity, and Alexander Sullivan was a great opportunist.
Born in 1848 in Amherstberg, Ontario, Sullivan was the son of Irish immigrants—his father was a British army officer. As a young man he moved to Detroit, where he invested in a shoe store, but in 1868 it was destroyed by a fire. Accused of arson, Sullivan was put on trial. Several witnesses claimed that he had purchased cans of oil, that they had seen him leaving the shop at about the time that the fire started, and that traces of oil had been discovered in the destroyed shop. However, two additional witnesses, one of whom—Margaret Buchanan—was his future wife, swore that he had been attending church with them at the time of the fire. The case was dismissed amid much talk of corruption, and Sullivan, unable to find work in Detroit, left for New Mexico, where he became postmaster in Santa Fe. In 1869, as a reward for his support of the Republican General Ulysses S. Grant in the presidential election, he was appointed Collector of Internal Revenue for the territory of New Mexico. The following year he bought the Santa Fe Gazette, which he renamed the Santa Fe Post and ran as a Republican newspaper. This was a short-lived investment, as in 1871 Sullivan was forced to flee the city following a dramatic shooting match in which he and General H. H. Heath (then Secretary for the Territory) took potshots at each other, and the discovery that $10,000 was missing from Internal Revenue accounts.
Sullivan's departure from New Mexico also severed his ties (albeit temporarily) with the Republican Party, and in the 1872 presidential election he supported the failed bid of newspaper editor Horace Greeley, the nominee of the short-lived Liberal Republican Party. After a brief stint in New York, he wended his way to Chicago. Drawing on his newspaper experience, Sullivan's first job in the city was as a journalist with the Chicago Evening Post, and he went on to work for both the Chicago Inter Ocean and the Chicago Times.
Within eighteenth months, Sullivan had settled in Chicago and appeared to have put his somewhat shady past behind him. His career in the press was brief, however: in 1874, with the support of City Treasurer Daniel O'Hara, he was appointed secretary of the Board of Public Works, a position carrying considerable influence and power, particularly as the city began to rebuild after the Great Fire. O'Hara's patronage convinced Sullivan that the fleetingly popular People's Party, and later the Democratic Party, was worthy of his support. Through the 1870s and 1880s, Sullivan's political loyalty flipped between the Republican and Democratic Parties and largely depended on which one promised him the greater rewards for his support.
Having secured a good job, Sullivan married Margaret Buchanan, a journalist and former teacher, in November 1874. Like Sullivan, Buchanan was of Irish stock. Born in Ireland, she moved to the United States in the aftermath of the Great Potato Famine, and the couple met in Detroit in the late 1860s. Following Sullivan's hasty departure from Detroit, she established herself in Chicago as one of the finest journalists not only in the Midwest but in the nation. She secured her first job at the Chicago Evening Post after she submitted articles via a third party. The editor, C. H. Ray, was so impressed that he made a job offer without meeting the author, and was surprised to find his new journalist was a woman. Margaret Sullivan was regarded by John R. Walsh, the owner of the Chicago Herald, as "the best living writer of English," and William O'Brien, who had little time for her husband, described her as "a lady journalist of remarkable gifts." She was on the editorial staff of the Chicago Herald, the Chicago Evening Post, and the Chicago Times during the late 1870s and early 1880s, but by 1888 she wrote primarily for the Chicago Tribune, where she was both an editorial writer and an art critic.
Margaret Sullivan played a key part in Alexander Sullivan's impressive reinvention of himself as a respectable, responsible member of society. However, it wasn't long before he ran into trouble again. In August 1876 he shot and killed a school principal, Francis Hanford. In an anonymous letter to the City Council of Chicago, Hanford had implied that Mrs. Sullivan had had an improper relationship with the mayor, Harvey Colvin. He claimed that she had used her influence not only to secure her husband the position of secretary of the Board of Public Works but also to cripple the public school system on behalf of the Catholic Church, which was desperate for church—rather than state-led—schools. Incensed, Sullivan and confronted Hanford at his home. When Hanford refused to retract his allegations, Sullivan shot and killed him. After trials in October 1876 and March 1877, both before the same judge, W. K. McAllister, Sullivan was acquitted despite evidence that he had gone to Hanford's house with a pistol and shot dead an unarmed man. There were allegations of corruption on the bench and in the jury—the judge had repeatedly taken the side of the defense and allowed Sullivan's supporters to applaud and cheer the defendant throughout the case. According to a contemporary commentator, "The acquittal of the defendant upon the second trial has helped to create a wide-spread belief ... that in the conduct of these trials justice was outraged." At the second trial, Sullivan was prosecuted by State's Attorney Luther Laflin Mills, and his key defense lawyer was William J. Hynes. In 1889 all three would meet again.
Despite the scandal associated with the killing of Hanford, Sullivan retained his job with the Board of Public Works. The board had responsibility for a wide range of services, including public buildings, parks, water, streets, and building permits, and as its secretary there was little going on in Chicago that Sullivan did not know about, and many favors he could and did arrange. But this wasn't enough for him. He set his sights on a legal career, enrolling at the Union College of Law. He was registered there at the time of the Hanford shooting but, following his arrest, was expelled. However, by 1878 the Illinois Supreme Court had admitted him to the Illinois bar upon the recommendation of a Chicago judge (an occurrence that also had about it the whiff of corruption—a familiar odor in all the dealings of Alexander Sullivan). Soon after his admission to the bar, he established a legal practice in partnership with Thomas G. Windes, who later became chief justice of the Circuit Court. Once again, Sullivan proved adept at reinventing himself. In the fall of 1876, he declared himself an ardent devotee of the cause of Ireland, and sought membership in a rapidly growing and influential secret society, Clan na Gael. His membership in the Clan would define the course of his life and bring him into close contact with the man whose funeral would bring Chicago to a standstill in 1889: Dr. P. H. Cronin.
* * *
Clan na Gael was a secret Irish republican society founded in New York in 1867. Like its predecessor, the Fenians, the Clan was dedicated to winning Irish independence from Britain through the use of force. The official name of Clan na Gael was the United Brotherhood, though few ever called it that.
At the outset the Clan's main stronghold was on the East Coast of the United States, where the majority of the Irish in America lived. Senior figures, including Jerome Collins, John Devoy, John J. Breslin, and William Carroll, were all based in either New York or Philadelphia. The East Coast was also where the Fenians had been strongest, and it was where the most important Irish American newspapers, such as Patrick Ford's Irish World and John Boyle O'Reilly's Pilot, were published. However, by the early 1880s the Clan's center of influence had moved seven hundred miles west to Chicago. A young, vibrant, and growing Irish population, a charismatic leader in Alexander Sullivan, and the tacit support of the Catholic hierarchy combined to make that city the new center of Clan activity.
The first Clan "camp" in Chicago was established in 1869 in the strongly Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport, and camps soon spread throughout the city. Membership was open to all men who were Irish-born or of Irish descent, and in Chicago thousands fell into that category. In 1870 there were almost 40,000 Irish-born residents of Chicago; by 1890 there were 70,000. If residents with at least one Irish-born parent are taken into account, the total "Irish" population in 1890 jumps to almost 180,000, or 17 percent of the city's population.
The first wave of Irish immigrants consisted primarily of laborers who had worked on the Erie Canal in New York State in the 1820s. When the Illinois and Michigan Canal was commissioned, they moved west to Chicago, and when it was completed in 1848 they stayed, the vast majority of them settling on the city's South Side, around Bridgeport. These men worked in nearby slaughterhouses, steel mills, brickyards, and brewing companies, and from 1865 onward at the sprawling Union Stock Yard. After the fire of 1871, so many Irish were working in construction that it led to "the boast that it was the Irish who had rebuilt the city." Yet many of them lived in little more than hovels. By the early 1880s, the Chicago Tribune declared that "Bridgeport has, in Chicago, become a generic term for smells, for riots, bad whiskey and poor cigars." Though there were considerable numbers of Germans, Poles, and Lithuanians living in that neighborhood, it remained overwhelmingly Irish in character, with the Irish accounting for 48 percent of its population. Just beyond Bridgeport's limits, in the streets that surrounded the stockyards, that figure rose to 70 percent.
Like other immigrant communities, the Irish in Chicago faced many challenges. Although a steady stream of Irish had landed in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, their numbers soared after the Great Potato Famine that devastated Ireland in the 1840s. Those who left Ireland for the United States were primarily Catholic, and for the Irish in America the church proved to be a very strong bond. Further, many Irish shared an antipathy toward Britain, or more specifically England. Young Irelanders such as John Mitchel encouraged that feeling—that the Irish in America were exiles forced from their land by the brutality of foreign landlords and the British government. Fraternal, charitable, political, sporting, and secret revolutionary societies sprang up to cater to the Irish immigrant, and these organizations formed a local network that provided friendship, a social life, and, in many cases, jobs. By the end of the 1870s, Clan members held a number of influential positions throughout the city, frequently helping Irishmen to secure jobs, obtain liquor licenses, and purchase homes. Membership in Clan na Gael also enabled the politically minded to participate in the struggle to free Ireland.
In an era of considerable anti-Irish and anti-immigrant sentiment, there was comfort in numbers. In Chicago, as elsewhere, Irishmen had many options when it came to seeking out the company and support of their countrymen. By the 1880s the three most significant Irish organizations in Chicago were the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic fraternal organization established in New York in 1836; the Land League of America, founded in 1880 as an open, visible organization pledged to support the Irish Land League and later the Irish Parliamentary Party; and Clan na Gael. Like many others, Alexander Sullivan was a member of all three. His initial attempt to join the Clan was rejected when he was blackballed by one Chicago camp because he was out on bail awaiting the second trial for the murder of Hanford, but following his acquittal in 1877 he found favor in another. Sullivan rose quickly through the Clan system, and by 1879 he was the head of the Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio District, a position that gave him direct access to Clan leadership. He was articulate and charismatic, and he inspired both great devotion and great antipathy among those who knew him.
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Excerpted from Blood Runs Green by Gillian O'Brien. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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