An Irish-American Odyssey: The Remarkable Rise of the O'Shaughnessy Brothers
288
An Irish-American Odyssey: The Remarkable Rise of the O'Shaughnessy Brothers
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826273208 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 08/22/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
An Irish-American Odyssey
The Remarkable Rise of the O'Shaughnessy Brothers
By Colum Kenny
University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2014 The Curators of the University of MissouriAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-7320-8
CHAPTER 1
Missouri Settlers
JAMES SHAUGHNESSY WAS AN ORPHAN when he immigrated to the United States. A boy setting foot on American soil for the first time, he had grown up in one of very many Irish rural communities devastated by a great famine during the 1840s.
James, the future father of adman and journalist James O'Shaughnessy and artist Thomas O'Shaughnessy, fled hunger and the disease that took his parents. Of all the Irish entering the United States between 1820 and 1900, "nearly one third thronged into the country in the eight short years from 1847 to 1854—a grim tribute to the rigours of the famine." Between 1845 and 1854 almost one and a half million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States, and James was among them.
James Shaughnessy found shelter first in New England. His descendants believe that he worked for a farmer near Milford, Massachusetts, and in local shoe factories. Many Irish were employed around Milford, where there was a burgeoning boot- and shoe-manufacturing industry. One of these was a certain Thomas Shaughnessy, a "boot bottomer," who appears to have been the brother of James. Neither James nor his brothers who followed him to America then used the Gaelic prefix "O" before their family name. Their children would later adopt it, proud of an ancient Gaelic heritage.
Settlers
It was common for Irish immigrants to stay along the eastern seaboard of the United States. But James, Thomas, and their brother John, who had been born in 1827, proved to be adventurous. They went west and made a new life for themselves as settlers in Missouri, a state that covers about twice the area of Ireland. Just how remote it was then is evident from the memoir of John Joseph Hogan, an Irish priest with whom the family became well acquainted and who appears to have been the first Catholic pastor to settle long-term in northern Missouri. Hogan, when later a bishop, recalled having consulted shipping agents in Ireland in 1848, who advised him that "as the American railways had been built only as far west as the western boundaries of New York and Pennsylvania, the journey westward to St. Louis [in Missouri], about 1,000 miles, was too great to be attempted by uncertain ways, such as stagecoaches and sailing on lakes and rivers." The Mississippi River, however, was navigable by steamboat, and in December 1848, Hogan spent eight days aboard such a vessel traveling from New Orleans to St. Louis.
Many Irish immigrants who went west actually fared better than the majority of those who stayed on the East Coast. By 1870 a large influx of Irish and Germans had helped to make Missouri the sixth most populated state in the Union. Its principal city of St. Louis, situated on the western bank of the Mississippi, became cosmopolitan. Travelers entered St. Louis by disembarking at the city's busy landing point, of which an inviting sketch was published back east in 1857.
James Shaughnessy went west and settled in northern Missouri at this time. He subsequently opened a shoe store in Keytesville, the Chariton County seat. It was here, about 1861, that he was naturalized as a US citizen. Shortly afterward his brothers John and Thomas joined him and began farming tracts of land in that county, at Salt Creek Township, not far from Keytesville. Deer were then abundant in the district. The family named its principal new homestead "Newhall," thus recalling a townland in the small Irish district of Kiltartan in County Galway, from which these brothers had emigrated. Their names appear on Missouri maps from 1876 onward, designating ownership of parcels of land near Newhall.
Emigrant aid societies frequently advised the Irish to leave overcrowded eastern seaports for places where labor was more in demand. However, census data clearly demonstrate that in purchasing farmland the Shaughnessys were an exception to the urban rule: "In 1870, for instance, only 14.6 per cent of Irish immigrants were engaged in agricultural pursuits, compared with 54.1 per cent of native-born Americans and nearly 23 per cent of all foreign-born persons."
Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century usually came from farming backgrounds, but most settled in towns in America. Few had money with which to buy land. Some also disliked the distances between farmhouses in the United States, which were greater than those between homes in Ireland, finding that such distances exacerbated any loneliness or sense of isolation.
Yet the fact that even the poorest immigrants were living in a society that was expanding and becoming wealthier gave them hope. Opportunities continued to beckon. In 1985, in his magisterial work Emigrants and Exiles that includes vivid descriptions of the experience of Irish people crossing the Atlantic to America, Kerby A. Miller, a professor of history at the University of Missouri, pointed out that "between 1840 and 1900—while Ireland's population shrank from 8.2 million to only 4.5 million—that of the United States soared [from 17.1m] to 76 million."
The Mulhollands
Another family of Irish origins, that of James and Ann Mulholland, facilitated the settlement of James Shaughnessy and his brothers in Missouri. This was not least because James married their daughter Catherine and acquired land from them. His descendants believe that he met her when going from house to house selling shoes.
About 1850, James Mulholland had been living in Indiana and was described that year in the federal census as a "Boss on Public Works." Before that he had worked on the construction of the Erie Canal in New York. But he was best known as "one of Chicago's pioneer citizens who with Ossian Guthrie helped in building the Illinois and Michigan canal." Many Irish emigrants got jobs on these projects and went on to labor on the construction of railroads. Itinerant workmen who married often lived with their families in makeshift camps and huts.
Mulholland also helped to construct the railroad across northern Missouri, running two hundred miles from Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River facing Illinois—via Chillicothe—to St. Joseph on the east bank of the Missouri River facing Kansas. The train replaced the uncomfortable four-horse stagecoaches that had taken forty-eight hours to make the same journey. The railroad project began in 1857 and ended in February 1859. During 1858 two rival gangs of Irish railroaders, those of contractor Mulholland and contractor Murphy, clashed. Fighting was, depending on how one viewed it, an occupational hazard or a recreational activity of the gangs building America's railroad network.
Although drawn to Missouri by the Hannibal to St. Joseph Railroad project, James Mulholland began to buy tracts of land in Clark and Salt Creek Townships in Chariton County, southeast of Chillicothe. In March 1857, for example, he purchased some property from James Demsey, an Irishman who in 1841 had acquired a cabin from the first settler in Salt Creek Township and had transformed it into a country tavern "which became a favorite stopping place." By 1860, then in his fifties and perhaps grown tired of managing railroad gangs, James Mulholland was described in the federal census simply as a "farmer," living in Clark Township with his wife, four children, two laborers, and a domestic servant who had three children of her own.
Pioneering Pastor
As one of a small number of Catholic families in northern Missouri, the Mulhollands soon got to know Fr. John Hogan. Hogan had come to America from Limerick in Ireland, where in his youth he heard Daniel O'Connell address great crowds. O'Connell was the foremost Irish political leader of the early to mid-nineteenth century and a champion of the oppressed. Hogan hoped to find a place where poor Catholic immigrants to the United States might settle as a community in Missouri, but he was informed when he began to look for a suitable location that government-owned land in the north of the state had all been sold, or given away to railroad companies, thus making its purchase too costly for people as impoverished as were most Catholic emigrants from Ireland. Hogan ranged far and wide in Missouri ministering to Irish women who were domestic servants and to men who worked on the railroads. In his vivid account of those years, he wrote that Irish immigrants could not find work as hired hands on farms "in competition with slave labor." He himself had prepared "poor negroes" for First Communion and was clearly shocked to see the way in which slaves were transported by river-boat in northern Missouri:
The night was very hot. Mosquitoes buzzed around in swarms, and were unrelenting in their attacks, so that sleep was impossible.... The darkies of whom there were about fifty on board, all athletic men, suffered many cruel hardships. Their keepers, a few armed men, held them chained together in squads, so as to hinder them from getting away at landing places. At night, formed into line, shoulder to shoulder, their faces turned one way, manacled with iron hand-cuffs man to man, they were made to lie down on their backs, on the boiler deck of the boat, without pillow, mattress, or covering—a position they could not change for one instant during the whole night, not even so much as to lie on one side. The groans of the poor fellows, as they clanked their manacled hands against the deck, or dragged and slashed in pain their booted heels on the rough boards on which they lay, were truly heart-rending. They were accused of no crime, were torn away without a minute's notice from their homes, husbands separated from wives and children, sons separated from parents, brothers and sisters. All were forced to leave dear friends and loved scenes behind them. Love of money caused it all.
Hogan was based in Chillicothe, from which he traveled on demanding journeys to serve his dispersed flock. A description of another hardy pastor in Missouri recalls how, similarly, "Father James Powers had much rough pioneer work to do, being often obliged to travel great distances, his journeys being made on a little pony, and frequently he would be compelled to swim all the little streams."
Hogan's fascinating account of his own early days in Missouri, recently republished, indicates what it was like for those who lived there. He discovered no land in northern Missouri that was both suitable and affordable for an Irish settlement but did begin to create such a settlement in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. His efforts were ultimately frustrated, apparently in large part by the disruption of civil war. The area of natural beauty that he chose for his project in the Ozarks was to remain sparsely populated, but his ambitions are reflected in its being known even today as the "Irish Wilderness." His pioneering attempts predated those of the Irish Catholic Colonization Society of America, which from 1878 to 1891, "made a bold effort to locate the slum dwellers on the prairies of the west."
Catherine Shaughnessy (née Mulholland)
One day in 1862, in northern Missouri, Hogan hurried to minister to one of his flock, Catherine Mulholland. She was the eldest daughter of Ann and James Mulholland, and the future mother of journalist and adman James O'Shaughnessy and his siblings. She was then extremely ill. Answering the sick call from Hickory Branch in Chariton County, Hogan took the train from Chillicothe for Brookfield, twenty-six miles distant. There he was met by a man on horseback who was leading a horse already saddled and bridled:
We rode on, through the hours of the night, a journey of eighteen miles, in a southeasterly direction, across the several branches of Yellow Creek, through the timber and over the prairies, of Linn and Chariton counties, until we came to the Mulholland Place—the residence of James Mulholland—a whilom [former] railroad contractor, and at this time a well-to-do farmer, advantageously settled on some of the most productive land in fertile Missouri. Received politely and with welcome, I entered the elegant country mansion, and was led without delay into the presence of the most beloved member of the family—a young lady, faint and almost lifeless, over whose features and emaciated form a pallor like death had spread.
Hogan administered last rites to Catherine, aged just nineteen. Her mother said that their family physician, having consulted with other physicians in that part of the country, had given up hope for Catherine's recovery. But she added, pointedly, that a different kind of healer was available. What she had in mind brought Hogan face to face with the culture of an immigrant people still steeped in folklore and superstition in their "elegant country mansion." She said there was "an old man, living in this county, who has the reputation of having cured many by some charms or supernatural agency that he has, and he has sent me word, that if I would send for him he would cure my Catherine." Hogan vehemently opposed the involvement of this old man, whose significance will be considered later when discussing the family's Irish roots. Hogan dismissed him as part of "the snares and deceits of the devil." He urged the family instead to put its faith in God and persuaded them to take Catherine to see certain "eminent physicians" in St. Louis. Following a difficult journey and treatment that ostensibly included an operation, and against expectations, she recovered.
Not long after this trauma, Catherine Mulholland married the immigrant James Shaughnessy, "a very worthy young man of that county" according to Hogan. They wed on March 12, 1863, with Hogan performing the marriage ceremony. The young couple decided to remain in Missouri, a fact that no doubt pleased Catherine's parents. In February 1864, Ann and James Mulholland sold James Shaughnessy "two hundred and forty acres more or less" for the sum of $2,000. The Mulhollands made their marks on the deed transferring this land, which suggests that they were illiterate. During that same month Elizabeth, first child of Catherine and James, was born and baptized.
Fright and Alarm
Catherine became distressed after giving birth, and the family again sent for Hogan. His graphic descriptions convey not only the conditions of the time in such isolated places but also how religion and superstition continued to vie with one another even in a new world. Catherine's upset was all caused, he believed, by the remark of a friendly but "unwitted" neighboring woman, "who said to the mother after the infant's birth, its limbs were deformed, which was by no means the case":
The young mother, from sudden fright and alarm for the safety of her child, lost her reason. For weeks she lay writhing in madness of the most violent and uncontrollable kind. Again, as on the several previous occasions of alternating joy and sorrow, the pastor was anxiously sought. I found the dear child in one continuing paroxysm, ever requiring strong and tender hands to keep her in bed, and to prevent her from biting and lacerating her arms and shoulders, and from doing like injury to those around her. Every article of movable furniture had to be put out of the room to prevent what she had frequently attempted—jumping for and seizing whatever appurtenance she could see, wherewith to do violence to herself or those around her, who, in their sore pity had to watch at her bedside—a post of duty at which she would consentingly suffer no one but a favorite sister and her pastor. Again God's mercy was earnestly sought by the Holy Mass and prayers to restore the afflicted one to reason and health. And again, the same temptations as before had to be encountered and resisted. The Old Man, professing to have wonderful powers, but not from God, was again heard of. This time he sent word not only to loving parents, but also and especially to the sorrow-stricken husband [James Shaughnessy], to be allowed to restore the lady to health, which he promised to do if invited to make use of his profession. At this crisis I redoubled my prayers as well as my entreaties. To all I replied, that God's merciful and providential ways alone had to be followed, invoked, and confided in; and that no power but God's should be sought or admitted in the affairs and destinies of that truly Christian family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Irish-American Odyssey by Colum Kenny. Copyright © 2014 The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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