In March 1874, Chicago’s Nativity of Our Lord Church filled with mourners commemorating the life and death of 25-year-old Christopher Rafferty. The man that they were mourning was a local boy, raised and known among Chicago’s South Side. In Rafferty’s final years, his name had grown in infamy, spreading outside the tightly-knit South Side Irish community and throughout the United States. In 1872, Rafferty had drunkenly killed Patrick O’Meara, a policeman and fellow Irishman. It was this crime that brought the newspapermen to the church that day. Over the previous two years, Illinois courts had held three trials for the murder. At each trial, Rafferty was found guilty and sentenced to death. However, due to a series of legal misadventures, it took until 27 February 1874 for the execution to be carried out.Footnote 1 Rafferty’s trials prompted discussions in newspapers in Chicago and across the urban centres of the American north about the wisdom and humanity of public executions, fears about copycat crime, and the need to reform areas of Chicago known for their ‘ruffian’ inhabitants. The reporting of the crime and subsequent trials provide a useful window into middle-class concerns about the ‘dangerous classes’ and society’s responsibility towards the poor of Chicago in the aftermath of the American Civil War and Chicago Fire of 1871. While considering these elements, this article focuses on the shifting importance of Rafferty and O’Meara’s ethnicity in the eyes of the press and in relation to community responses to the men. While the trial reporting focused on Rafferty and O’Meara’s social status and occupational networks, it was in death that Irish people, and Irish-American stereotypes, were weighed against each other. It was at this stage that newspaper reporters took the opportunity to compare the relative ‘goodness’ of the men and the ethnic communities to which they belonged.
On 5 August 1872, Officer O’Meara met his colleague Officer Patrick Scanlan at Mrs O’Brien’s bar on South Halsted Street. The officers suspected that Rafferty, a figure well known to police based in the Bridgeport area, was disobeying the terms of his bail and would be drinking there. They were correct. Christopher Rafferty had been released from the Armoury prison on 4 August where he had served a week’s hard labour for starting a riot and attacking a man with a brick. On his release, Rafferty spent a day and a night drinking, apart from two or so hours when he was ‘dead drunk’ in an alley. When O’Meara and Scanlan arrived at the saloon to arrest Rafferty, he apparently read the arrest warrant and determined that the warrant was not legal. In response to the attempted arrest, Rafferty drew a Colt revolver, ‘aimed it steadily at the officer [O’Meara], who cried out “Stay, Chris, don’t shoot;” but the cowardly dog cooly ran his eye along the barrel, and covering his victim’s heart, pressed the trigger’.Footnote 2 O’Meara was killed outright and Scanlan was injured in a subsequent scuffle. In the chaos, Rafferty escaped.
A search party was sent out, and Rafferty was soon found walking to Joliet, forty miles southwest of Chicago. Thirty-five days later, Rafferty’s first trial concluded. At jury selection, potential jurors were questioned to determine ‘their sagacity and stupidity, their thirst for gore and their predilections toward Quakerism’ while the courtroom was filled ‘almost beyond capacity’ with young men from the labouring classes.Footnote 3 Rafferty was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Rafferty’s lawyer, Edward A. Small, was a skilled practitioner and appealed to the Supreme Court for a writ of supersedeas. He argued that a change of venue had been requested for the trial due to the bias of those in Cook County and it had not been granted. Small was successful in his appeal. In early 1873, Rafferty was tried again for the crime in Waukegan, Illinois. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang until dead. Again, Small went to the Supreme Court to appeal that, as the warrant for Rafferty’s original arrest was illegal, the indictment against his client was incorrect. The technical flaw in the indictment allowed for a third trial of Rafferty, in which the charge was altered from murder to manslaughter. Due to an 1827 law and Illinois Supreme Court decisions in 1859, Illinois law gave juries ‘in criminal cases the power to decide both the law and the facts’ and, in this case, the jury again returned a charge of ‘guilty’ and amended the charge back to murder.Footnote 4 Rafferty was hanged on Friday 27 February 1874 behind the Waukegan Jail walls. With that execution, Christopher Rafferty became the first person to be privately hanged for killing a Chicago police officer.
Though there have been some excellent recent studies on the Irish and death,Footnote 5 the study of modern Irish funerary culture, in Ireland and the diaspora, has yet to receive extensive scholarly attention.Footnote 6 The Rafferty case study contributes to this discussion of how death and the subsequent rituals were ethnically coded and used to make wider comments on the ‘Irish character’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While in death Rafferty’s Irish heritage became a focus of reports, what the Chicago Daily Tribune called the ‘peculiarly made up’ nature of the Irish was barely mentioned in reports of his trials.Footnote 7 This is a study of a moment in time where Irish Chicagoans were accessing new levels of power: moving between the poverty and anti-Catholicism of the Famine and post-Famine migration to the ‘lace curtain’ Irish of the 1880s. Rafferty and O’Meara, it was posited, were two sides of the same coin. This was a crime of Irishman against Irishman, one part of the upwardly mobile and powerful ranks of the Irish political machine and the other, a career criminal who lived up to the negative stereotypes of America’s poor Irish.Footnote 8 Everyone involved in the murder — Christopher Rafferty, the bar owners Daniel and Mary O’Brien, by-standers Thomas McGur and Michael Waters, the police officers shot and injured, and Officer Mahone (sometimes Mahoney) who eventually arrested Rafferty — was either Irish or of Irish descent.
This article explores press reactions to the killing of one Irishman by another, and particularly the ways that middle-class journalists and contemporaries attempted to clarify that, despite the response to Rafferty’s funeral, ‘O’Meara was a far better Irishman than Christopher Rafferty’.Footnote 9 The idea of a ‘better Irishman’ largely came down to their positions in Chicago life. One was presented as upwardly mobile, respectable and unobtrusive, though part of a police force increasingly known for its corruption. The other was securely part of Bridgeport’s underclass, a violent but charismatic person who was ‘regarded by the rowdy mass of Bridgeport and vicinity as a kind of hero’.Footnote 10 The trials and reaction to Rafferty and his victim Patrick O’Meara provide researchers with insights into the differing views of ‘respectable’ and ‘ruffian’ men in Chicago during the early 1870s and particularly how these perspectives were translated into judgements on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Irishmen. These judgements were articulated at a time of labour instability, rising ethnic and class tensions, and rapidly shifting political allegiances in Chicago. The evolving press portrayals of Rafferty and O’Meara, and their respective communities should, therefore, be viewed through the lens of conflicting social and political anxieties over a period of a two years.
This article will firstly set the scene for this murder and the trials, highlighting the place of Irish people in a rapidly growing city and the role of newspapers in shaping public debate around crime and class. It then considers these debates, particularly those connected to the often-competing tensions of ethnicity and class, in relation to the ‘ruffian’ element and criminality in Chicago during the 1870s. The potential spectacle of Rafferty’s execution was both a popular demand and a concern to political actors worried about making Rafferty an Irish and working-class martyr: politicians and journalists were torn between the ‘need’ to make a stand against crime, especially violence against the police, and the thrill and normalcy of violence in a youthful society built up amidst the blood and death of the slaughterhouses, stockyards and saloons of nineteenth-century Chicago. Finally, this article examines the rhetoric around Rafferty and O’Meara’s relative ‘Irishness’ in death and the deployment of stereotypes regarding Irish rebellion against figures of authority. Julie Marie Strange has argued that the wake was ‘inextricable from negative assumptions concerning the Irish immigrant poor’,Footnote 11 and also ‘an essential component of reformulating a national, cultural and religious identity in an alien environment’ for Irish immigrants.Footnote 12 The case of Christopher Rafferty, and the press reactions to the commemoration of his death, aligns with both of these observations while highlighting the ways that, in Chicago at least, this was reclaimed on a class basis. As memorialisation ‘reveals how the dead are incorporated into the identity of the surviving family, community or state’,Footnote 13 the tensions between Rafferty and O’Meara — working class and professional, criminal and police, two Irishmen, two men hailed as heroes, two flawed, dead men — can shed important light on how identities and community loyalties can shift and be used and claimed in telling the story of a society.
I
Chicago’s position by Lake Michigan and within the canal and rail complex had aided its economic boom in the 1850s; however, it was the Civil War that cemented Chicago’s place within the United States’ power structure.Footnote 14 Rail link improvements during the 1850s meant that by the time that war broke out, Chicago was established as the western terminus of the trade rail route from New York, via New York state, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Through the canal and rail links, its reach also extended down the Mississippi River. The American Civil War’s four years of fighting in places other than Chicago resulted in a wealthier and more productive city, and with this came an increase in ethnic nepotism in politics and business. The war brought an increased demand for Chicago’s resources while its position as a transport hub meant that troops, munitions and supplies could be moved to any part of the country.Footnote 15 Chicago’s entrepreneurs set about creating the industries which would provide these resources: stockyards to sell and buy animals, slaughterhouses to kill them, and salting factories to preserve the meat before it was loaded onto railroad lorries. Additional industries which used the by-products of these animals, for example soap and candle makers, also emerged. By the end of the Civil War, the city had its own production industries, including the Chicago Union Stockyard district which provided employment for thousands of people over the next century.Footnote 16 These rapidly expanding industries, the stockyards and associated slaughterhouses, as well as towns like Pullman which were directly related to the railroads, meant that the population of Chicago was still doubling in each census year during the later nineteenth century.Footnote 17 By 1870, 48.4 per cent of Chicago’s population had been born outside of the United States.Footnote 18 At the same time, more than one-third of those born in Ireland were living outside of the island.Footnote 19 The children of these immigrants were frequently deeply ensconced in ethnic communities, educated in the language of their parents, and attending religious services with fellow migrants.Footnote 20 The demand for an immigrant workforce continued to expand after the Chicago Fire of 1871 left the newly wealthy and expanding city with around 17,500 buildings burnt down, 100,000 homeless, and between 120 and 300 dead. The Chicago Fire led to the rebuilding of the city along more class-based lines, separating the middle-class and wealthy Chicagoans from their poorer neighbours, making poverty and drunkenness less visible outside working-class areas.Footnote 21 In 1872, however, this process was only just beginning. The murder of Officer O’Meara and Rafferty’s ‘ruffian’ status became a cause célèbre for those determined to re-build Chicago as a social and moral ideal in the United States.
The two leading characters in this story, Christopher Rafferty and Patrick O’Meara, had been born in Ireland and moved to the United States as children. O’Meara was born in Bohercarron, County Limerick in 1834,Footnote 22 while Rafferty was born over a decade later, possibly in County Meath.Footnote 23 Both men had grown up in Irish communities within the United States, largely in Chicago, though with a decade in New York City for the Rafferty family. The Irish in Chicago have been the subject of a number of studies which focus primarily on nationalist activities and involvement in the American Civil War.Footnote 24 Others have explored the position of the Irish in the labour struggles of the city, Irish social and economic uplift, and more recently, the Irish Catholic women religious that helped to shape the lives of the Irish communities therein.Footnote 25 While Patricia Kelleher’s influential work on James A. Mulligan and William J. Onahan provides an important case study of the social and intellectual circles of upwardly mobile and ambitious Irish and Irish-American men in Chicago, this article sheds light on those who were securely entangled in or with the city’s criminal underclass.Footnote 26 Mulligan and Onahan were literate and recognised as active American citizens and leaders of Irish associational life. As a result, their lives are documented and archived. Rafferty was also typical of men in his station of life and left little record of himself though, just before his death, he did give his side of his story to the Chicago Daily Tribune.Footnote 27 Without a personal archive, this article builds most of his world from the records of his crime, trials and the voices of those who supported and judged him as a criminal, drunkard or friend.Footnote 28 Christopher Rafferty and his family were part of two groups named by Eric Monkkonen as ‘anonymous Americans’: criminals and paupers.Footnote 29 While Monkkonen concludes that criminals tended to be of a higher status than paupers, it was the melding of pity for the Rafferty family and awe at Christopher Rafferty’s crime that made the case so sensational and long lasting. His position as an Irishman or an American, a ruffian or a community hero, was a matter for public record and dispute. There is also a characteristic imbalance in the record reflecting the status of perpetrator and victim: O’Meara’s reputation as a ‘good’ officer persists but, apart from one Tribune column and his final words, O’Meara’s voice is missing.
II
There is a rich body of work relating to crime and criminality in nineteenth-century America, and Chicago holds an important place in this scholarship. A centre of vice, corruption and ethnic tension, Chicago became a hotbed of gangland activity in the early twentieth century, continuing themes that had coloured its reputation during the nineteenth. Jeffrey S. Adler and Richard Lindberg have written widely on homicide and policing in Chicago, while there is a growing literature on gender and criminality in the city.Footnote 30 The reforming efforts of Chicago’s middle classes, who sought to improve both the lives of inhabitants and the reputation of the city, have also been the subject of a growing literature.Footnote 31 Carolyn Conley argues that by ‘examining homicide trials, their outcomes, and the rhetoric surrounding them, it is possible to glean a good deal of information about both common wisdom and practical realities’.Footnote 32 Homicide trials provided a public arena for discussions on class, respectability and the role of the state. As working-class criminals often left little record of their own thoughts, we are reliant on newspapers and the writings of the middle classes and should, therefore, prioritise the ‘the foundation of the middle-class perception’ over seeking to document the motivations of the criminal.Footnote 33 As such, this article relies heavily on newspaper sources to examine these debates, particularly relating to how law and order fears interacted with ethnic and class-based stereotypes to ferment social panic in the city.
As newspapers have been considered ‘part and parcel of metropolitan identities’, they act as useful mirrors into the key debates and social expectations held by Chicagoans at the time.Footnote 34 Julia Guarneri notes the important position that metropolitan newspapers held in the construction of urban identity and community. This was particularly important in a rapidly expanding city like Chicago where there were more newspapers printed each day than there were inhabitants.Footnote 35 From the 1870s, newspapers began to take an active role in promoting their editors’ vision of community life in ‘the modern metropolis’. David Nord argues that it was in this and the subsequent decade that newspapers came to live within the cities that they represented, altering the relationship between publisher and reader to one based on civic participation, not merely discussion of the news.Footnote 36 Interestingly the Rafferty trial, which so captured the imaginations of newspaper editors aimed at a general American audience, was ignored by the Irish-American press, perhaps in an attempt to avoid taking sides. Chicago’s mainstream newspapers did not have such reservations.
The Chicago Tribune, Journal, Post and Inter Ocean all covered the trials and execution heavily, and articles made their way into newspapers across the United States. The Tribune’s interest cannot be extricated from the political priorities of the city’s administrators. Joseph Medill, the Tribune’s editor and controlling stakeholder, was also Chicago mayor between 1871 and 1873, elected on a cross-party reforming ticket. His newspaper was specifically marketed as the ‘businessman’s newspaper’.Footnote 37 Medill’s mayoralty ended in conflict with the People’s Party, a political allegiance between Irish and German opponents of anti-liquor laws and critics of perceived police overreach.Footnote 38 This political conflict rose in importance during Rafferty’s second and third trials, extending into the debates surrounding Rafferty’s execution. The Chicago Times, which apparently made efforts to entice readers from the ‘slums and back alleys’ of Chicago’, was helmed by Carter Harrison, who later became Chicago mayor (elected 1879, 1881, 1883, 1885).Footnote 39 William Penn Nixon edited the Inter Ocean from 1872 alongside Frank Palmer, who was later elected the postmaster of Chicago.Footnote 40 Newspapers can, of course, never be approached as neutral conduits of information, and Chicago’s mainstream newspapers were explicitly connected to the power structures of the city. They were arenas for unabashed political campaigning and, while the emphasis was still on sharing ‘the news’, these newspapers provide insights into the conversations over the right to power and respectability at a time of high political tensions.Footnote 41
III
The rhetoric surrounding the Rafferty-O’Meara case was blurred by the shifting nature of Rafferty’s perceived inclusion and exclusion in Chicago’s working class. He was simultaneously part of the working class and the criminal class, and the portrayal of his position within these classes changed across the years of his trials. The success or failure of his prosecution would set the tone for the city’s attempts to reduce crime and control the intemperate behaviour of labouring Chicago: a city in which drunken brawls were the leading cause of homicide during the 1870s.Footnote 42 According to the Daily Inter Ocean, Christopher Rafferty was considered ‘among the disorderly legions of the northwestern portion of the city as “the roughest of the rough” — a title which he used his most vigorous efforts to retain’.Footnote 43 At his trial, five police officers came forward to testify that during the five years that they had known Rafferty, ‘his reputation has been of the worst description, being ugly, vicious and quarrelsome’.Footnote 44 His friends’ assurances that this description only suited Rafferty after he had imbibed alcohol did little to change how Rafferty was perceived — though it did provide a useful hook for temperance campaigners.Footnote 45 When Rafferty shot O’Meara, he was a repeat offender. In September 1869, he had been charged with assaulting an officer, arrested and had his bail set at $1,000.Footnote 46 During his service in the 156th Illinois Infantry, the 5’ 6” 18-year-old had been confined in the Union Army-controlled Fort Pickering, Memphis, presumably also for misconduct.Footnote 47 The Daily Inter Ocean did note that ‘as his comrades aver, [he] always showed himself a soldier of good courage, although somewhat subordinate at times’.Footnote 48 Even by his own account, he had been involved in two assaults (though he had broken one up as well) in the small time he was free between the Armoury and the O’Briens’ bar.Footnote 49
Rafferty did not act alone though. During the brawl in which he shot O’Meara, reports noted that Rafferty was watched by six or seven other men in the bar who did nothing to help Scanlan or O’Meara, ‘but rather by their actions encouraged the wretch Rafferty to resist’.Footnote 50 Two of these ‘unwilling witnesses, who had shut their ears to his cries for help, when officer Scanlan was struggling for his life … were committed to jail on the Coroner’s warrant, as witnesses, bail being fixed at $1,500 each’.Footnote 51 In contrast to this group, Patrick O’Meara was remembered as ‘very inoffensive, and was a general favorite — the ruffian element, as a rule, respecting his honesty and having some rude admiration for his gentlemanly demeanor’.Footnote 52 Confusing the picture further was Rafferty’s account that although he had been drinking almost constantly for two days, Mrs O’Brien had refused him alcohol and insisted that he ‘Take a glass of pop, like a good boy’. O’Meara and Scanlan, conversely, had previously drank with Rafferty, and Mrs O’Brien gave them each a whiskey when they arrived at the saloon that day.Footnote 53
The portrayal of Rafferty as both a ‘cowardly dog’ and a ‘hero’, depending on the community setting the boundaries of these terms, had important repercussions for how his crime, and his masculinity, was perceived by his South Side community and in wider Chicago. O’Meara similarly was a man, or a victim, of dual perceptions — a ‘gentleman’ but also an officer within a violent police force with tightening connections to political corruption.Footnote 54 These shifting perceptions of what ‘manliness’ entailed and how it was performed were framed in different ways at different times, in terms of class, of occupation, of ethnicity.Footnote 55 These perceptions, in turn, intersected with stereotyping of South Siders, of police officers and of Irish people in Ireland and abroad. Irish stereotypes were heavily gendered and the Irish involvement in the relatively recent violence of the Draft Riots and Orange Riots ‘strengthened the popular stereotype of the Irish as an inferior race that was innately ignorant and violent’.Footnote 56 The Molly Maguires killings in Pennsylvania, which included the killing of police officers, during the late 1860s and 1870s also contributed to the rhetoric surrounding Irish distaste of officers of the law.Footnote 57 While connections to these recent events were not explicitly made in the newspaper reports during the trials, it was a theme that became particularly apparent after Rafferty’s execution.
Newspapers seized on the image of the figure of authority being pitted against criminals and the ruffian class, regardless of ethnicity. And there was clear anger at the murder of O’Meara, even within the Bridgeport neighbourhood which would later come to the defence of Rafferty. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, the Chicago Evening Post reported that Rafferty required ‘a large escort’ as, if he did not have one and ‘the Bridgeport people were to know it, he would infallibly be lynched’.Footnote 58 Policing was a dangerous but lucrative occupation which had the added perk of lengthening the arm of the, often corrupt, city political machine.Footnote 59 The Irish political machine of Chicago was inherently linked to the Irish police and fire departments: Irish police officers frequently marched in St Patrick’s Day parades and were involved in specifically Irish benevolent and social organisations.Footnote 60 In 1866, Irish-born men made up an estimated 27 per cent of policemen in the city. As a sign of their growing influence, six out of the eight men in the Chicago detective department were of Irish descent, as well as three captains and two sergeants in the force.Footnote 61 In certain districts in the city, Irish-born men accounted for five out of six police officers. This was not unusual in northern cities of the United States; for example, 84 per cent of police officers in St Louis between 1835 and 1857 were foreign-born, mostly from Ireland.Footnote 62 A typical police officer in Chicago could make between $600–700 a year and, for many, policing choices ‘were not guided by any sense of moral obligation to the community but by a desire to survive the complexities of local politics’.Footnote 63 With their connections to the city’s political apparatus came corruption. However, while the 1870 and 1871 Green-Orange riots in New York were explicitly linked to Irish control of Tammany Hall, similar connections between the Chicago political machine and Irish violence were not.Footnote 64 Those who led the demand for law and order, and faith in the police force, were however embarrassed when it emerged that the warrant issued for Rafferty’s arrest was not legal, leading to his second stay of execution. It was found that the officers of the South Branch Police Station (also known as the Deering Street station) were in the habit of signing blank warrants at the beginning of the day for ease of access.Footnote 65
While ethnic and religious allegiances could often be depended upon to provide succour to Irish Catholic communities, class and occupational loyalty should not be underestimated. While Rafferty was repeatedly known to the police and was portrayed in the newspapers as a violent man in and out of prison, he also maintained a strong community within Chicago’s brickyards though, in his Daily Tribune interview, he claimed to have lost his ‘place’ working for M. O. Walker’s brickyard due to his involvement in a strike at the end of July 1872.Footnote 66 His role in the strike did nothing to dissuade support from fellow workers; in fact, it may have aided it.Footnote 67 In the immediate aftermath of Rafferty’s arrest, collections were held across brickworks, raising almost $1,400 within three weeks and funding Mr E. A. Small, Rafferty’s highly successful lawyer. It was expected that, if needed, that figure would double. The Chicago Evening Journal declared that ‘any amount of money [needed] can be raised’ for Rafferty’s defence or, it was implied, to bribe the jury deciding his fate.Footnote 68 Rafferty was a proud part of the brickmaking community; he was visited by brickmakers while in prison and drew attention to his occupation in interviews.Footnote 69 Wearing a silver star-shaped medal engraved with ‘Cris Rafferty, the best brick-yard man in Illinois’, a gift of his employer Thomas McLennon, Rafferty used this ‘as a refutation of the reports that he had been a loafer’ in one interview.Footnote 70
After Rafferty’s first murder trial was stayed, the Chicago Post declared that ‘The next bully who raises his bludgeon or points his pistol upon a policeman, will remember Rafferty, and if Rafferty be saved by a technicality of a clumsy and inadequate law, the policeman’s life is taken and his assassin spared’.Footnote 71 The fear that other men would take comfort from Rafferty’s quashed sentence was brought to effect in March 1873 when Patrick and James McVeigh, and friends, shot police officers Koch and Reinert ‘but two roads north of the scene … that Chris. Rafferty shot Policeman O’Meara. The vicinity is known as “Hamburg,” and is resorted to, night after night, by the worst characters in Chicago.’Footnote 72 While Koch and Reinert both survived, they were badly injured. Charles J. Koch, born in Germany, joined the force five months before being shot and took credit for shooting three of the McVeigh brothers.Footnote 73 The Irish identity of the McVeigh brothers was commented upon in the newspapers; however, there was no explicit judgement about their nationality. The ‘desperate encounter between six roughs and two policemen’ had resulted in ‘two Bridgeport pets, in search of some “bloody fun”’ being killed. These ‘pets’ were the McVeigh brothers. When the Tribune reporter arrived at John McVeigh’s Dashiel Street house, he found the house ‘filled with a crowd of sullen Irishmen, whose faces indicated that no deeds would be too bloody to satisfy their revenge’. Faced with uncommunicative witnesses, it was up to the Catholic priest Father Jeremiah S. O’Neill to act as the family spokesman.Footnote 74 Father O’Neill would later oversee Rafferty’s funeral.
The Tribune warned that the attack on Koch and Reinert showed the prevalence of the ‘ruffian sentiment that a police officer is a social enemy, who is to be killed whenever occasion offers’. While there needed to be no trial in the case of the McVeigh brothers due to their deaths, it was argued that ‘Had the case of Rafferty been prosecuted with even ordinary diligence and care, and he had been punished, it is probable these two men would not have been killed, nor Officer Koch so brutally beaten and mangled’.Footnote 75 A year later, amidst backlash against perceived police overreach in closing saloons on Sundays, the Chicago Tribune noted that Rafferty
was one of the class who thought it a “big thing” to shoot a “peeler.” Those officers go upon the patrol every night conscious that at any moment they may be assaulted, stabbed, shot, or murdered; that, if they interfere with the lawless class, they risk their lives by so doing. Yet these policemen are all the protection that stands between the general peace and safety of the community and the murderous acts of the robber, footpad, and ruffian … He was an honest, faithful, and courageous officer. He was shot down, brutally, cowardly, maliciously, and shot because he was an officer.Footnote 76
While, the Post acknowledged, even the ‘most wilful criminal has the right under the law to the uttermost protection which the law can afford; but the community has the right so to frame the law that it shall not afford better protection to the criminal than to itself’.Footnote 77 The paper complained that the Chicago gallows were ‘oft disappointed’ and this was a danger to the law and order of the city.Footnote 78 Jeffrey Adler posits that Chicago’s killers were rarely punished: between 1875 and 1920, only 24 per cent of those arrested for homicide in Chicago were convicted and only 37 per cent faced criminal trial.Footnote 79 Of those arrested for killing police officers, two-thirds of arrested suspects were convicted and 14 per cent were executed.Footnote 80 Adler continues that it was due to an uncompromising belief that all Chicago men ‘were entitled to resist challenges, yield no ground, brook no disrespect, and stand up to threats, virtually any violent behavior in a rough-hewn saloon or working-class neighborhood could be viewed as an act of self defence’ that Cook County jurors consistently favoured defendants in murder trials.Footnote 81 Yet Rafferty, who was in a rough-hewn saloon in a working-class neighbourhood when he committed his crime, was found guilty by three separate juries, even when confronted with an illegal warrant. In the first trial, this decision was made within twenty minutes.Footnote 82
IV
Rafferty’s popularity within the brickyards and certain Irish communities of Chicago became a particular concern once he had been sentenced to death for the first time. David Garland uses ‘the peculiar institution of capital punishment as a window onto American culture and social relations’.Footnote 83 In addition to a window into American culture, it also provides a useful entrance into the ways that ethnicity was engaged with in nineteenth-century Chicago. Where and when Rafferty ‘became’ Irish, as opposed to part of an American criminal class, highlights the fears of native-born Americans about the idiosyncrasies of ethnic community priorities. Rafferty’s trials and execution were used to make broader moral judgements on Chicago society, particularly the importance of education in wiping out ignorance. One important element in this fight to remove ignorance was investment in the public school system and the reduction of the influence of the Catholic Church in the lives of the lower classes. The Tribune concluded that ‘Low and vicious instincts were born in him, and they were fostered and developed by his rearing. He was surrounded with ignorance and the brutality to which it is kin. Religion to him at best a blind faith which was easily overcome by drink and vicious associations.’Footnote 84 Even when parishioners acted in contravention of the Ten Commandments, the Catholic Church remained an important element in their lives.Footnote 85 Their eternal souls could be protected, even if their lives had not necessarily been religiously committed. This protection was not appreciated by all however, with an increasing, mainly Protestant, vision of the priesthood’s influence over Irish people as dangerous to the priorities and ideals of American life. In 1872, the Illinois legislature amended the state’s 1870 constitution to stipulate that free education should be provided for children aged between 9 and 14, but that there should be no grant of any school funds or property made ‘for sectarian purposes’.Footnote 86 It was the hope of legislators that by providing free and early education, separate from religious instruction, ‘the spirit of evil is curbed and crime proportionally diminished’.Footnote 87
While his Catholicism was alluded to, it was in relation to his proposed public hanging that the only reference to Rafferty’s Irishness in life was mentioned. The Chicago Post in September 1872 noted that were Rafferty hanged, for example at the foot of Twentieth Street — the site of the first public hanging in Chicago — the execution would ‘lose nine-tenths of its wholesome moral effect on the dangerous classes of the community’. It would also imperil law by ‘inciting Bridgeport ruffians to make a Shamus O’Brien of the condemned wretch’.Footnote 88 While Rafferty was still referred to as a ruffian, this allusion to Shamus O’Brien illustrates an awareness of his ethnicity. Shamus O’Brien was the subject of an Irish song popularised at the time by Will S. Hays,Footnote 89 and a poem by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, commonly attributed to Samuel Lover.Footnote 90 Shamus O’Brien was, according to the ballad, captured by the British after the failed 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion and was hanged publicly to the heartbreak to all that knew him. The end of the eighteenth century had witnessed ‘a new genre of song — the execution ballad’, and the story of Shamus O’Brien, a handsome, if odd-looking lad who was a friend to all, had arrived in the United States before the Civil War and re-emerged in 1867.Footnote 91 A show based on O’Brien’s story had a strong run at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago from 1867 to 1868.Footnote 92 Rafferty was no Shamus O’Brien, a martyr in the Irish struggle against British rule. However, he did become a figure of debate. By the end of the nineteenth century, the death penalty had become ‘a policy instrument’ in the western world, ‘[w]hat had once been a tragic necessity now became a contingent and conditional choice’.Footnote 93 In Rafferty’s case, the choice was how to determine if this was a crime of passion influenced by alcohol or a result of Chicago’s failures to protect all its citizens from human failings and poverty. Not only was Rafferty a career criminal and convicted murderer of a police officer, but he was also, as the financial support he received and the crowds at his funeral showed, a beloved figure within the politically powerful Irish migrant communities in Bridgeport. The threat that his potential martyrdom held was not only societal. It was political.
Studying the responses to Rafferty, and the choice to execute him behind the walls of Waukegan Jail, provides insight into the fears of the Illinois political elite. The most vocal calls for societal accountability were from his friends and from those campaigning for the end of capital punishment.Footnote 94 The loudest voice came from the Hon. Marvin H. Bovee, a member of the Wisconsin senate.Footnote 95 Bovee later published a book entitled Christ and the gallows, or reasons for the abolishment of capital punishment.Footnote 96 In a letter to Governor John L. Beveridge, and published in the Daily Inter Ocean, Bovee argued that Rafferty should be spared the rope for a range of reasons, including: Christian faith; the possibility of reforming Rafferty; and Rafferty’s mother. He asked: ‘The mother of this unfortunate man is aged and blind. For nine long years have those sightless orbs looked in vain for the light of day. Would you add mental darkness to this already tortured soul[?]’Footnote 97 Rafferty’s mother also featured in a petition presented to Governor Beveridge prior to Rafferty’s execution. Signatories of this petition included Thomas Foley, bishop of Chicago, and Leopold Mayer, a prominent banker from Chicago’s Jewish community. Another petition from Lake County called for Rafferty’s sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment, while eleven senators and thirteen representatives signed one more. In addition to the crowds who arrived in Springfield to petition the governor in person, there were numerous letters protesting the sentence, including those from jurors who claimed undue pressure.Footnote 98
The Tribune, edited by the city’s mayor, also joined the debate. It acknowledged that ‘Society, it is true, owes a duty to the class to which Rafferty belonged, which is does not adequately discharge; but the failure to discharge this duty must not override the first law of self-preservation’. While there was a duty of care owed to the poor and ill, law and order had to be enforced ‘if we would hold Society together’.Footnote 99 Rafferty’s death had to mean something and, according to the Tribune, that lesson was to strike fear into those who acted in the same way to undermine society’s order. It was acknowledged that
The work of eradicating the viciousness by removing the ignorance of the lowest classes in society is a slow one. Rafferty’s crime is a reminder that we must go at it with renewed vigor, but Rafferty’s execution is also a warning to those classes that, while we are at it, society shall be protected against their assaults. If the two lessons make the impression they ought to make, the two deaths of O’Meara and Rafferty will not have been altogether without compensation.Footnote 100
There was one particularly important voice opposing Rafferty’s execution. Police Commissioner Mark Sheridan, another Irishman, penned an open letter to Joseph Medill, the Tribune’s editor, arguing against ‘judicial murder’. A supporter of the new People’s Party and a powerful political opponent of Medill, Sheridan was not only acting in solidarity with a working-class Irish community. Sheridan had gone into exile after the Rising of 1848 when, according to one biographer, ‘he might have easily had a hempen necklace if he did not escape to America’.Footnote 101 Perhaps mindful of past experience, Sheridan went as far as likening those who called for Rafferty’s execution to those who hurried Jesus’s death by shouting ‘Crucify him; crucify him!’Footnote 102 This opposition, in the eyes of the Evening Journal, was a disgrace to Sheridan and his office as police commissioner. Christopher Rafferty was a poor Irish immigrant without a powerful or connected family. The same was true of his victim Patrick O’Meara. In this battle of equal connections, the sides were blurred and intersecting. The community that Rafferty came from may have lacked monetary influence, but it held power. Police officers and the people that they policed were frequently from the same community, continued to live in close proximity to each other and contributed to similar voting blocs. Rafferty noted that he had frequently drunk in the same premises as both officers.Footnote 103 Proximity held its own threat. Officer Crogan, a witness in Rafferty’s trial, subscribed $1 to a collection for the injured Scanlan on the day of Rafferty’s execution. He quickly withdrew the gift though, concerned that ‘Rafferty’s friends might make capital out of it as being a jollification over Rafferty’s execution’.Footnote 104 A fortnight after Rafferty’s execution, the Inter Ocean noted that Sheridan’s views on Rafferty would continue to cause problems in the South Branch police force while ‘there are Americans on the police force and Irishmen who are apprised of the views of Commissioner Sheridan’.Footnote 105 While Chicago’s newspapermen may have wanted to create a binary between Rafferty and O’Meara, men like Police Commissioner Sheridan and Officer Crogan recognised, and potentially suffered from, the overlapping nature of ethnic, religious and class loyalties in Chicago’s South Side.
V
In early 1874, Edward Small’s ingenuity for saving the life of his client ran out and Rafferty was hanged privately behind the walls of Waukegan Jail. Though there were fears of an escape attempt being launched by his friends, the execution went smoothly.Footnote 106 Rafferty was accompanied by two priests, one from Waukegan and one from Chicago, along with his family who had taken the train that morning, and around 400 spectators who included the press of Illinois and surrounding states. After his death, as per his last wishes, Rafferty’s body was transported back under the direction of Father Gavin to ‘my people’ in Chicago by train.Footnote 107 His body went firstly to the family home for ‘forty-eight hours of watching’ and then to the Nativity of Our Lord ChurchFootnote 108 on South Halsted Street, a short distance from the scene of his crime two years previously. It was at this moment, in death, that newspapers seized upon Rafferty’s Irish identity and the supposed Irish roots of his crime. Ironically the only person to dwell on nationality in the newspapers up until this time, with the exception of the Shamus O’Brien reference, was Rafferty, and it was his friendship with numerous Germans that he focused upon. The Irish backgrounds of his friends, family and other saloon keepers were seemingly deemed irrelevant, or perhaps obvious from their names, place of residence and actions, by both Rafferty and the journalists.Footnote 109
The reporting of Rafferty’s funeral noted that most mourners were well-behaved and respectful. However, the potential threat to social order that mourners posed was repeatedly highlighted. The sense remains that this working-class, migrant community did not realise how fortunate they were to live in a society where the ‘officer of the law is the servant of the people, not of the despot’.Footnote 110 The idea of Ireland as a violent society and, therefore, that violence inherently coloured Irish social relations in the nineteenth century was a popular one and one which has continued through the centuries.Footnote 111 As James Kelly has shown, there was also a historic resistance to executing people who had admitted their guilt within Ireland, with a sustained tradition of intervention and protest in the face of perceived injustice.Footnote 112 Conley notes that in Britain, English crimes were ‘attributed to deviant individuals who were alien to the true English nature, Irish crimes were inevitably interpreted as a reflection of national character’.Footnote 113 This idea was transferred into American society. The Tribune declared that
The Irish nature is peculiarly made up. It has more detestation for petty than for great crime. It will shrink from contact with a thief, a libertine, or a gambler, but it does not quiver at the sight of blood, unless the slaying be surrounded by peculiar circumstances, such as murder for robbery or for the gratification of brutal lust. Explain it who may, it cannot be denied that the uneducated Irish masses have very small sympathy with policemen, - especially at home. This feeling they sometimes carry with them to America.Footnote 114
Richard McMahon’s study of homicide in pre- and post-Famine Ireland has shown that violence during the nineteenth century was relatively contained and homicide rates were comparable to other European countries.Footnote 115 However, this image of the Irish as a violent and irrational people, or at least a proportion of the Irish, was pervasive and one that middle-class Irish-Americans sought to counter at every point.Footnote 116
The Chicago Tribune author continued that the ‘Irish people are proverbially impressionable … They are not a cruel, treacherous people; but they are fierce, and, when their passions are thoroughly aroused, are often prone to blood-thirstiness.’Footnote 117 This newspaper report builds upon stereotypes common throughout the Anglosphere of Irish people unable to control their emotions and anti-Catholic tropes of people blindly following their priest. L. Perry Curtis and Cian McMahon have explored the ways that these transnational stereotypes developed and were deployed against Irish people and particularly Irish Catholics abroad.Footnote 118 Mentions of mourners stamping on the ‘green sod’ to ensure that the ‘body-snatcher’ did not come similarly alluded to Irish superstition.Footnote 119 The distinction between the ‘intelligent, educated Irishman’ who sympathised with the murdered police officer and the ‘unthinking portion of the Irish people’ who made Rafferty a ‘popular idol’ reflected wider debates between different generations, class, and migration waves of Irish people. While the terms ‘lace curtain Irish’ and ‘shanty Irish’, to distinguish the upwardly mobile from the persistently poor, were popularised in the 1890s,Footnote 120 the instinct to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’, particularly through the performance of respectability politics, was in full swing by the 1870s.
As Maja Hultman has demonstrated in her examination of Jewish funerals in Stockholm, public funerals, particularly those which took place in the streetscape, provided a platform for ‘the contestation of authoritative narratives’.Footnote 121 Large funeral processions allowed minority groups to claim a space for themselves temporarily and to challenge dominant narratives — in the case of Rafferty’s funeral, to explicitly demonstrate the respectability of Rafferty’s community. As Chicago’s main Catholic cemetery was in Evansville, part of the mourning process and performance included train travel from the South Side of Chicago to the far north of the city. As such, the thoroughfares between the South Halsted Street church and the main railway station, the Northwestern Depot, ground to a halt as men and women crowded to pay their respects. The hearse carrying his body was ‘adorned with the melancholy pomp of sable plumes’ and was followed by sixteen carriages and two dozen other vehicles.Footnote 122 This was a claiming of public space for funerary customs, and specifically, an Irish Catholic funeral. The need to catch a train to Calvary Cemetery necessitated the movement of Rafferty’s friends and families out of the South Side, extending the claiming of space into the train carriage — seven cars were reserved by Rafferty’s mourners — and up to the North Side of Chicago. The funeral procession of Patrick O’Meara had followed a similar path, moving from St Bridget’s Church in Bridgeport to Calvary Cemetery, though he was accompanied by ‘the Commissioners of Fire and Police, all the members of the force not on duty, and a large concourse of respectable citizens’.Footnote 123 As Deborah Durham and Frederick Klaits have shown, ‘funerals focus attention on questions of public conduct’.Footnote 124 This expectation of what public conduct looks like varies between context but, for those observing Rafferty’s funeral, the blending of Irish and American customs, and the religious, folkloric and class expectations attached to those, were used to make wider comment on ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’ Irish Chicagoans.
O’Meara’s widow and orphaned children provided a sympathetic family for people to contrast Rafferty’s malicious actions with. The Rafferty family were also portrayed as a family entirely dependent on Christopher Rafferty’s income from brickmaking. However, as Rafferty had been in and out of jail, this is questionable. While O’Meara’s widow Julia was left to care and provide for five young children, Rafferty left a lame father, blind mother and ‘mad sister’. He had three brothers and two sisters, some of whom probably contributed to the family’s living, though two of his brothers were still children and John, his older brother, was also in trouble with the law.Footnote 125 The day after Rafferty shot O’Meara, John was placed under a bond of $700 for making threats to shoot anybody who arrested his brother.Footnote 126 Small emphasised that Rafferty was a young man and had many good friends ‘and really deserves them’ and, when not affected by drink, was ‘industrious, honest, and kindly to all’.Footnote 127 One article in the Daily Inter Ocean conceded that ‘He used to work hard for a living, whenever he was not on a spree, which was too often for his own good and for the peace and welfare of his neighbors’.Footnote 128 It was remarked that ‘[h]ad Rafferty been educated, he might not have been a spasmodic drinker … O’Meara might be still living and his own days may have been long and happy in the land.’Footnote 129 The Rafferty family provided a clear and concise example of the downtrodden slum-dwellers of Bridgeport for the middle-class reformers of the city to hold up as both a threat to the respectable inhabitants, including the O’Mearas, and the reputation of Chicago. Alderman Jonas launched a petition for the city council to provide Mrs O’Meara with $1,000 in recognition that her husband had been killed on duty. Though the city attorney found that the city had ‘no authority to make such an appropriation’, Alderman Lynch and other aldermen sought to find financial provision for the grieving widow.Footnote 130 The Rafferty family conversely were left to their community and reliant on ‘Celtic generosity’ which, as Edward Small could attest, could be very generous when required.Footnote 131
VI
Christopher Rafferty’s body was received by his family, priest and fellow brickmakers. Among the ‘stalwart men’ who carried his coffin from the express car which brought him back to Chicago was Con Tracey, the keeper of a saloon where Rafferty had drunk on one of his last days of freedom.Footnote 132 The Tribune reporter, in recognition of how Rafferty had been presented in the press, noted the extreme animosity felt by Rafferty’s friends and family, those based ‘in Irish parlance, … [in] the “corpse-house”’, towards the press. The author warned fellow reporters that ‘should they ever visit the brick-yards or Con Tracey’s saloon, [they] had better first take out a first-class life-insurance’.Footnote 133 Unwelcome as they may have been, the reports of newspapermen provide vital sources for historians seeking to understand the lives of Irish people who lived in Chicago. The longevity of Rafferty’s trial allows for further exploration of the priorities of Chicago’s reformers and other ethnic and occupational communities over the space of two years. This article has explored the ways that commentators appropriated Rafferty’s class and ethnic classifications at different times to make judgements on the shifting social and moral state of the city. While Rafferty was alive to put forward his own views, his ‘ruffian’ status and class was focused upon as part of a wider commentary on crime, ignorance and the hopes of middle-class reformers for the future of Chicago’s society. It was not until Rafferty was dead that the ‘Irishness’ of the situation was emphasised.
Rafferty’s trials occurred within the context of rising fears about socialism and worker violence. The Panic of 1873 was followed by seven years of depressed economic activity and prompted a reshuffling of class loyalties. However, Rafferty was not part of the factory proletariat, nor was he one of the rising number of ‘tramping men’ who made their way from railway towns and port cities to find work in the years after the Civil War, and particularly in the aftermath of the economic depression when the ‘tramp burst onto the national scene’.Footnote 134 Though he had been involved in a brickyard strike, he cannot be understood as one of the radicalised socialists of the Haymarket era who justified their violence towards police officers and civilians as part of an internationalist struggle. Instead, newspaper reporters constructed Rafferty as part of the ‘dangerous classes’, a ‘spectre which haunted the middle classes, being partly real and partly illusory’, a threat which could cross district boundaries though rarely did.Footnote 135 When his Irishness was emphasised, it was in comparison to his victim, Patrick O’Meara, who, at least in posthumous tributes, was the epitome of a ‘good Irishman’: part of the city’s infrastructure and, it was implied, adhering to the respectability politics promoted by middle-class and native-born American reformers in Chicago. These distinctions may have been laid out in black and white in the city’s newspapers, but the actions and sentiments expressed by those who had daily experience with Chicago’s South Side Irish demonstrate that these apparent distinctions were far from stable.
While the murder of Patrick Henry Cronin in 1889 would highlight the deep divisions within Chicago’s Irish and Irish nationalist communities,Footnote 136 the Rafferty case showed the everyday tensions between Irish-born men in the working-class area of Bridgeport. Both cases captured the interest and imagination of readers far beyond Chicago. However, the Rafferty trials provide a useful insight into the Irish communities of Chicago. Rafferty, a man who, according to the Chicago press, lived up to all negative Irish stereotypes, was portrayed primarily as a reflection of his position in life, not his ethnicity. He fought, he brawled, he drank heavily, he attacked figures of authority. However, in the two years of trials, it was only in relation to Rafferty’s death — or the prospect of his execution — that his ethnicity was explicitly alluded to. O’Meara’s murder was not a nativist attack or an anti-American attack. It was a clash of aspirations, class and societal position. It was this perceived difference of reputation and authority — O’Meara, the respectable and hard-working father and public servant, against Rafferty, the drunken ruffian — that captured the imagination of the press and city reformers and provides researchers with an important case study for the examination of constructions of identity in nineteenth-century Irish Chicago.
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