The Sons of Molly Maguire by Bulik Mark;

Author:Bulik, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2015-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

11 Mars in Mahantango

You may have Pottsville laid in ashes and a thousand barbarities committed.

—Gen. Darius Couch, 1863

On March 3, 1863, Congress approved an unprecedented expansion of federal power with two laws that were to have dire consequences in the anthracite region. The first was the Habeas Corpus Act, which ratified the Lincoln administration’s suspension of the writ the previous summer. It was a necessary precursor to the second measure: the Enlistment Act.

Like the Militia Act of 1862, its predecessor the year before, the Enlistment Act sounded innocent enough. In fact, it authorized a new, federal three-year draft. And like the Militia Act, the fundamentally unfair manner in which it was enforced in the coal region aroused violent opposition. The suspension of habeas corpus left authorities free to deal with that opposition by the harshest means available, including the taking of hostages. The man named by the U.S. provost marshal to enforce the draft in the 10th Congressional District, which included Schuylkill County, was Charlemagne Tower, who was appointed to a similar state post in December 1862.

An attorney, a coal speculator, and a former Schuylkill County district attorney, Tower was a confirmed Republican. As a young man at Harvard, he was a close friend of Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts whose 1856 beating at the hands of Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina foreshadowed the bloody conflict to come. Tower had already served in the war, as commander of an eighty-man militia unit, the Tower Guard, which served for three months and had seen action at Williamsport, Maryland.1

Tower came to the post determined to suppress any repetition of the 1862 draft troubles, when women had thrown hot water at the enrollers. “Nothing but a sufficient military force, vigorously directed to crush opposition, will prevent the re-enacting of last year’s scenes and riots,” he wrote Secretary of War Stanton in May. “I propose, if women or anybody else interfere, to arrest them at once and dispose of them . . . If the opposers become too numerous and threatening for me to arrest them, I shall propose to have martial law declared in this county and the general commanding this department come in with sufficient military force to put down the turbulent.”2

Tower wanted to use federal conscription in 1863 to finish the work Bannan had started the year before, but his plan to treat those who had evaded the militia draft as deserters ran into opposition from the War Department. Thwarted in his plan to specifically target the 1862 draft evaders, Tower switched his focus to immigrants. Citing the high number of foreigners in the region, Tower, like Bannan, stressed the need for a large draft.3 And like Bannan, Tower was deeply suspicious not only of “turbulent miners” in the West Branch, but also of their political leaders in Pottsville.

When the Schuylkill County commissioners ordered the captains of two volunteer companies in Pottsville to return two hundred muskets, Tower wrote to Gov. Curtin that two of the three commissioners and the county sheriff were opposed to the war.

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