by Patrick Young, Esq. – Blogger
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When Pat Cleburne went for a walk with his friend Thomas Hindman on May 24, 1856, he made sure he was armed. It was not the young lawyer’s habit to carry a pistol when he walked around in Helena, Arkansas, but he was afraid of being attacked by Know Nothings. 1
Patrick Cleburne was born in Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day Eve, March 16, 1828. His family was neither of the poor indigenous Irish Catholic majority, nor from the large Scots Irish settler minority. His father was from the Anglo-Irish professional class. While his parents were not wealthy, the Cleburnes were more prosperous than 9 out of 10 people in Ireland.2
The Anglican church where Patrick Cleburne was baptized. His father’s grave is in the foreground. Thanks to Damian Shiels for all pictures of Cleburne related sites in Ireland.
Cleburne’s father was a doctor and he appears to have been a liberal. At a time when Irish Catholics lived under a British version of Jim Crow, Dr. Joseph Cleburne cast his vote in favor of Catholic Emancipation. A third of a century later, his son would propose an emancipation plan for the Confederacy.3
Pat Cleburne was born in the upper room above the bay window. He lived here at this County Cork home for eight years. Photo Damian Shiels.
Pat Cleburne lost his mother while he was still a baby. Soon after, his father married Pat’s governess. As the young boy grew, his father’s situation improved and the family moved into a fine country home. When he reached his teens, Cleburne was sent to an expensive Protestant boarding school to prepare him for a professional career. However, his academic life ended in 1843 when his father died. 4
The Cleburne family home during their last thirteen years in Ireland. According to archelogist Damian Shiels, it was considerably larger in the 1840s. Two tenant families farmed the fields owned by the Cleburnes.
The Cleburne family’s economic status began to decline right after Dr. Cleburne’s death. Rather than burden his distressed step-mother by moving home, the fifteen year old Pat Cleburne apprenticed himself to a druggist. His bid for self-sufficiency did not last long. When the Irish Potato Famine hit, the entire Irish domestic economy collapsed and Cleburne lost his job. 5
The young man tried to get licensed as a pharmacist, but when he failed, he disappeared from his family. He later said he felt disgraced by his failure. The now seventeen-year-old hid his identity and enlisted in the British army as a private, something only a desperate man would do. The army was feared throughout Ireland for its mind-numbing routine and the wanton brutality of its discipline. Very few men bred to the Anglo-Irish gentry served as enlisted men.6
The regiment Pat Cleburne served in was made up of poor landless Irish Catholics and hardscrabble Scots Irish. If Cleburne was assertive, he would have been a target for both groups. Instead, he appears to have served quietly and without distinction during years when Ireland’s peasantry slowly starved to death. 7
The Cleburne family lived in rural County Cork, one of the areas hardest hit by the Famine. Source
In 1849, the third year of the Great Famine, Pat Cleburne’s step-mother proposed that the entire family move to America. Pat responded that “the prospects of [Ireland] are anything but good; and experience goes very far to prove that they will not be better.” With the Cleburne’s family home likely to be gobbled up by creditors, Pat wrote to his sister that “if Mamma has made up her mind to go, the best plan would be to go as soon as possible.”8
Cleburne purchased his way out of the army. He had no regrets in leaving. He later told friends that if he had stayed “I would now be a poor servile mercenary without a will…of my own.”9
Only two weeks after leaving the army, Cleburne was on his way to America. 10
Unlike the Irish peasants who were crowded into the storage areas of the Famine Era “coffin ships” where the death rates could be frightening, Cleburne could afford food and to sleep in a cabin. While the economic catastrophe associated with the Famine forced his immigration, he was not escaping starvation. Instead, he was hoping to take advantage of the vast opportunities open to him in the new world11
Patrick Cleburne arrived in New Orleans on Christmas Day, 1849. He was not destined for the South, instead he was traveling upriver to Ohio. He soon found work in a Cincinnati drugstore. While working there, he was offered a job running the apothecary store owned by two doctors in Helena, Arkansas. Five months after he came to America, Cleburne was on his way South. A year later he owned the drug store he had been invited to run.12
Helena, Arkansas
Helena in 1850 was a small Mississippi River city of six hundred people. A small number of Irish immigrants lived in the town, but many more came through as crewmen on river boats or as members of road building work gangs. 13
Pat Cleburne quietly distinguished himself in his new home by his abilities as a druggist, but friends recalled that he was disdained by the local single women as a “raw, gawky young Irishman.” He also compromised his standing in the community with his youthful drinking bouts. He apparently had difficulty controlling himself when he drank and he was forced to largely abandon alcohol.14
After just a short time in Helena, Cleburne was able to achieve a prominence that would take most immigrants years to reach. Even though he was not yet a citizen, he became the master of the local Masonic Lodge and a leader in the city’s Episcopal Church. In an article praising Cleburne that was also inflected with bigotry, the local newspaper pronounced him “thoroughly Americanized.”15
Just as Cleburne was securing his place in the community, a national movement against immigrants was taking hold. The anti-immigrant Know Nothings were on the rise in the mid-1850s. Although they are often thought of as a Northern phenomenon, they had a great deal of support in the South. 16
The 1856 presidential election was the only true national contest to gauge the Know Nothing strength. Nationally the Know Nothings received 22% of the vote. The vote for the Know Nothing ticket exceeded that in every Southern and Border State. In Arkansas the Know Nothings received 32% of the vote. 17
In his first years in America, before he became a citizen, Pat Cleburne had been a supporter of the Whig Party, the same party as Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams. When that party disbanded over the slavery question, the young immigrant shifted about trying to find a new political home. His need for political direction was fueled by his fear of the Know Nothings.18
While he was working at his drug store, Cleburne spent his spare time studying law. When he was admitted to the bar, he became a prize for the Helena Democrats. Thomas Hindman, who would later become a Confederate general, was a tough Democratic leader. Cleburne was won over by Hindman’s solid opposition to the Know Nothings. While Cleburne did not seek a political career, he joined the Democratic Party and he worked to shape local politics even before he took the oath of citizenship.19
Masthead of a Know Nothing newspaper published in Boston.
Cleburne’s first political speech was an attack on the rising tide of anti-immigrant politics. As an immigrant, and speaking with a noticeable Irish accent, he denounced the Know Nothing proposal to bar the foreign born from holding all government jobs. Although he himself was a Protestant, he described the Know Nothings’ demand that all Catholics be barred from political office as “unwise, unjust, and unconstitutional.”20
This July 1855 speech marked Pat Cleburne’s first public association with the fight against the Know Nothings. It would set the stage for the deadly violence of May 24, 1856 that would nearly take his life.21
Video: The Memory of the Civil War in Arkansas:
Resource: Damian Shiels explored the Cleburne homes in County Cork, Ireland.
Sources:
1.Meteor Shining Brightly: Essays on Major General Patrick R. Cleburne by Mauriel Phillips Joslyn Terrell House Publishing (1998); Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997); Biographical Sketches of Gen. Pat Cleburne and Gen. T.C. Hindman by Charles Nash published by Tunnah & Pittard (1898); Biographical Sketch of Major-General P.R. Cleburne by Gen. W.H. Hardee Southern Historical society Papers Vol. XXXI edited by R.A. Brock 1903 pp. 151-164
2. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997) [NOTE: all sources will be inserted by Nov. 1, 2013]
3. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
4. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
5. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
6. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997) p. 21
7. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
8. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997) p. 21-23
9. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997) p. 23-24
10. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
11. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997) p. 94.
12. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
13. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
14. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997) p. 39.
15. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997) p. 32
16. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
17. The Know Nothing vote in the North fell off sharply after the founding of the Republican Party in 1854. In the South, its membership was swelled by the absence of an alternative to the Democrats. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
18. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
19. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
20. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997) p. 37-38.
21. Stonewall of the West: Patrick Cleburne and the Civil War by Craig L. Symonds published by University Press of Kansas (1997)
