Such was the domestic condition of the country, such the elements of convulsion and upheaval fermenting beneath the thin crust of its social order, such its relations with the greatest naval Power of the world, in the month of April, 1887. From that time the march of events was rapid to the final disaster.
V.
THE FIRST ERUPTION.
The 19th of April was a fateful day in the history of the Republic. On the 19th of April, 1775, was fought the battle of Lexington, from which the nation dated its birth as an independent Power. On the 19th of April, 1861, the Massachusetts Volunteers, hurrying to Washington to protect the national capital from the threatened attacks of Southern rebels, were fired upon in the streets of Baltimore by a mob of rebel sympathizers. On the 19th of April, 1887, began in bloody earnest the revolution which was fated to end in the utter extinction of the Republic and the erasure of its once proud name from the list of nations.
The socialist leaders took to heart and profited by the lesson which the Cincinnati riots of 1884 had taught. Those disturbances began in the indignation of an outraged public, angered beyond endurance by the shameful, repeated, and demoralizing defeats to which justice had been subjected in the local courts of law. But they soon took on a different cast. What had at first been the protest of good citizenship was transformed into a saturnalia of crime and ruffianism. Yet the very fact that good citizens had been concerned in the first day’s imprudences made the task of putting down the outlaws and criminals who continued the riots on the second and third days so much the more difficult. The suggestion contained in this was not to lie fallow in the secret councils where anarchy was plotted. Long after the conspirators were ready to strike, they delayed the blow, till an occasion should arise in which they might seem, for a time at least, to be the allies of good and patriotic citizens. Had a leader with a purpose been behind the Cincinnati riots, they saw that the work of suppressing them, after their initial success, would have taxed the resources of the country as well as the State. They waited for an opportunity.
Composed of men whose grievance was against all law and order, and whose dream was of untrammelled personal liberty and license, the socialistic organizations had yet been gathered together, at this time, into a certain union. They aspired after anarchy, but had reason enough left to see that if they would destroy an organized government, they must themselves organize. They had a head, a mysterious centre known among outsiders and to the most of the socialists themselves as “The Council of Seven,” but whom the few fully initiated knew to be a single individual.
Even to this day the name of this person is unrevealed. Like “The Man in the Iron Mask,” his identity promises to become one of the mysteries of the ages. Those who were permitted to share his counsels were few in number, and bound to him and to each other by terrible oaths requiring them to preserve eternal silence. Among themselves his name was never uttered or written. He was referred to sometimes as “Number One,” sometimes as “Ben Hassan,” sometimes, with an approach to familiarity, as “The Old Man.” Whoever he was, it is certain that he must have been a man of vast executive ability, of iron will, of amazingly fertile resources, and of a hatred of civilization and of the amenities of humanity which would have done credit to the prime minister of hell. He received the advice of his “cabinet” of confidential associates; he was in constant correspondence with socialistic societies all over the Union and in Europe: but it is the testimony of all the correspondence of this period so far unearthed that his rule was autocratic, and that even those who protested most fiercely against all distinction of rank and position yielded him for the time being a slavish obedience, holding in complete abeyance their dearest theories until such time as their schemes of disorganization and anarchy should have become successful. His headquarters were never mentioned, and his orders emanated from widely separated parts of the Union; but it was commonly believed that his principal abiding place was in Chicago.
For years Chicago had been noted for the inefficiency and corruption of its courts, which were so manifest as to call down censure even from men who saw nothing serious in the decadence of courts elsewhere. Frequent miscarriages of justice had made the people of the city angry beyond measure; and the prophecy had been in many mouths that a repetition there of the Cincinnati riots, starting from a similar cause, was only a question of time.