The life and times of John Kelly, tribune of the people

by J. Fairfax McLaughlin

The objectors, however, were unyielding, and the report of the Committee of Conference was disagreed to by a vote of 74 noes to 67 ayes.

The interests of Brooklyn always have had a warm advocate in Mr. Kelly, and although in more recent days he has found there some of his most active political opponents, it may be doubted whether those gentlemen have proved themselves truer friends of the general interests of that great city than John Kelly.

In a former chapter of this book allusion has been made to the many gross misrepresentations of Mr. Kelly’s motives and actions to which the press has given circulation. A glaring instance of this bearing of false witness against the neighbor is to be found in a volume entitled The American Irish, by “Philip H. Bagenal, B. A., Oxon.” This Mr. Bagenal seems to be, not an American Irishman, but an English Irishman of the London Tory variety, whose booklet smacks of the facile courtier of some Cabinet Minister, not far off from Downing Street or Pall Mall. It is a libel on Ireland and Irishmen at home and abroad, now on Mr. Parnell in Wicklow, and again on Mr. Kelly in New York. Bagenal writes not so well, but after the fashion of Dr. Russell, another English Irishman, familiarly known as “Bull Run Russell.” The latter’s vulgar caricatures of President Lincoln, in his letters to the London Times, caused his expulsion from the military lines of the Federal army during the war. Peripatetic book-makers from abroad, who take hasty journeys through this country, generally contrive to pick up a budget of miscellaneous misinformation, which they cram into misbegotten books, and offer for sale in the London market. Mr. Bagenal’s mission appears to have been to contribute an English tract on Irish life in the United States, for English partisan use in Ireland. To say that the alleged facts in this book are frequently untrue, is to characterize the performance very mildly. Mr. Parnell and his followers, according to Bagenal, are enemies of Ireland, and architects of ruin and anarchy only less reprehensible than the dynamiters.

“In New York,” says this scribe of the London Times, “we find the Irish dying faster than any others, less given to marriage than any others, and more given to hard work and fasting than any others. * * I visited the tenement houses in New York where the Irish population dwell. * * Everywhere the moral atmosphere is one of degradation and human demoralization. Gross sensuality prevails. The sense of shame, if ever known, is early stifled. * * Thus live the descendants of the great Irish exodus of 1845-48. * * They sought such occupation as offered; they underbid labor, adapted themselves manfully to the conditions of industry, or joined the rabble that trooped as ‘ballot-stuffers’ and ‘shoulder-hitters’ in the train of the Tweeds, the Morrisseys, and the Kellys of the day; and so became the scourge of American politics. In those bygone days when the Irish-American nation began to grow on Yankee soil, had Government directed and assisted the tide of emigration, hundreds of thousands would have been carried out West; where, accustomed to agricultural pursuits, they would have become quiet and prosperous citizens, instead of fire-brands and perpetuators of the animosity between England and Ireland.”[50]

This slanderous picture of the Irish population in New York is followed by an account of Bishop Ireland’s noble efforts to build up an Irish colony in Minnesota, and the great West. Mr. Bagenal holds up Mr. Kelly as an enemy of this great movement. What a pity he did not ask Bishop Ireland, with whom, he says, he became acquainted at St. Paul, who were the leading co-workers with that pious churchman in opening up a home for Irish settlers in the new States of the West? Bagenal would have learned from Bishop Ireland, had he sought to know the truth, that John Kelly had aided this philanthropic work by giving to the Bishop one thousand dollars, afterwards increased to nearly two thousand, as a contribution to the St. Paul Catholic Colonization Bureau. Knowledge of this circumstance probably would not have deterred Bagenal, the vilifier of Mr. Parnell, from describing Mr. Kelly as the enemy to Irish colonization in the West. The typical London snob abroad is revealed in the mendacious sentence concerning “the rabble that trooped as ‘ballot-stuffers’ and ‘shoulder-hitters’ in the train of the Tweeds, the Morrisseys and the Kellys of the day,” and sufficiently proves the Downing Street inspiration of this Tory romancer, who, it appears from his preface, is a writer for the London Times.

John Kelly, throughout his whole career, has been an earnest advocate for the settlement on the fertile prairies of the West of the poor emigrants who crowd into the Eastern cities, too often to starve for the want of employment. Twenty-seven years ago he introduced one of the first Homestead bills brought forward in Congress, which was a statesmanlike effort to relieve the overcrowded population of the great cities, and to build up the prosperity and happiness of the struggling masses of his fellow-citizens. He supported this bill in a speech of great vigor, in which he pointed out the advantages of homes in the West to the poor, and sought to place the acquisition of such homes within the reach of every citizen of the United States, who wished to become an actual settler upon the teeming millions of land that then belonged to the Government. Had his bill been passed, the gigantic railroad monopolies of to-day might not be in possession of the mighty landed empire which they, in so many cases, acquired by fraud, and hold by corruption, against the rights of the people of the United States.

On the 18th of January, 1858, Mr. Kelly introduced a bill in Congress to secure homesteads to actual settlers upon the public domain. The bill was read a first and second time, and referred to the Committee on Agriculture. This great measure which Mr. Kelly then brought forward, one of the most beneficent that ever claimed attention in the American Congress, was originally introduced by Andrew Johnson, March 27, 1846, then a Representative in Congress from Tennessee. More than six years elapsed before the House acted on this bill, but the indomitable Andrew Johnson, future President of the United States, persevered in his statesmanlike advocacy of the measure, and the House of Representatives finally passed it May 12, 1852, by a majority of two thirds. The bill, unfortunately, failed in the Senate. The same bill, in substance, was again introduced in the House in 1853 by John L. Dawson of Pennsylvania, where it was passed a second time by an overwhelming majority. As it had done before, the Senate again rejected the bill, under the mistaken notion that it would weaken some of the old States to allow a flood-tide of population to pour into the new ones.

The next attempt to carry through the measure in Congress, and to bestow happy homesteads on homeless millions of American citizens, was that of Mr. Kelly of January 18th, 1858. About the same time Andrew Johnson, then a Senator, introduced a similar bill in the Senate, and became, as before, its powerful champion. The House, being in the Committee of the Whole, May 25, Mr. Kelly made one of the ablest speeches of his life on the Homestead Bill. The length of the speech, and the scope of this volume, preclude its reproduction here. A few extracts are all that can be given:

“Mr. Chairman,” said he, “I regret that the bill which I had referred to the Committee on Agriculture, in the early part of this Session, has not as yet been reported on, as I would have much preferred addressing my remarks on the homestead question to the bill itself. I will take occasion to observe, in passing, that the Committees of this House have been prompt in making their reports even on matters that sink into insignificance when compared with the question of giving an humble homestead to actual settlers on the lands of the Government. If the Committee should think proper to delay their report much longer, I shall feel it to be my duty, at an early day, to move for their discharge from the further consideration of the subject, and ask leave to bring the bill directly before the House. If the Senate bill does not reach us in the meantime, I may fail even in this way to secure a vote on the question; but I will have the consolation to know that I have done my duty to those of our fellow-citizens who are either too modest or too poor to command much influence in this Hall.”

“The main provision of the bill now before the Committee consists in the liberal appropriation contained in the first section, in the following words: ‘That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, shall, from and after the passage of this act, be entitled to enter, free of cost, one quarter section of vacant and unappropriated public lands which may, at the time the application is made, be subject to private entry, at $1.25 per acre, or a quantity equal thereto, to be located in a body, in conformity with the legal sub-divisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have been surveyed.’”