Breaking Bad – Frank McNally on Irishmen who went over to the dark side during the American Civil War

Not all the bad guys in Georgia’s Andersonville prison camp (as mentioned here Wednesday) were on the Confederate side of the American Civil War.

The suffering of Union soldiers incarcerated there was compounded by the evildoing of fellow inmates. And the worst of those, reflecting the make-up of the prison population generally, included several Irishmen.

Among the six eventually hanged for their crimes was a Sarsfield, a Sullivan, and a Delaney. There was a Collins too, although he had been born in England.

Given the level of overcrowding in the camp, their executions are thought to have been the most witnessed in US history. None was watched more avidly than that of Collins, who had to be hanged twice.

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It was probably inevitable, given the lawlessness of Andersonville, that a criminal overclass would emerge eventually. Sure enough, a gang called the “Raiders” soon preyed on weaker inmates.

They may have numbered as many as 500, although most were foot-soldiers, under a hierarchy at the top of which was William Collins, a promoted veteran of Gettysburg.

Sometimes they tricked the innocent, typically offering watches for sale and marking those who expressed interest as having enough money to rob. When necessary, they used violence, sometimes murderously.

But in Andersonville, even a non-violent robbery could be a death sentence for the victim. In a camp where hundreds died every week from disease, malnutrition, and exposure, to have a blanket stolen was potentially fatal.

Some prisoners took to protecting themselves by forming mutual support groups. Members of one – nicknamed the Plymouth Pilgrims because they had been captured at Plymouth, North Carolina – were known to have substantial arrears of back pay.

That made them prime targets. So as a defence, they shouted “Pilgrim” when attacked, on hearing which, others would rush to help.

But the turning point in the Raiders’ reign of terror involved a man who proved helpless before the robbers, and was so badly beaten, he never recovered.

His name too was Irish: John Dowd (in some versions Doud). With added resonance, he had lived in a place called Avoca, New York, where he was his mother’s sole support.

He was in the habit of stitching money into his clothes for safety, but an expression of interest in one of the infamous watches doomed him.

A gang of four – James (or John) Sarsfield, Patrick Delaney, John Sullivan, and Andrew Muir, all Irish – attacked him with knuckle-dusters and knives. Sarsfield was heard to threaten he would “cut your heart out and shove it down your throat”.

Dowd was subsequently freed from the camp – one of the last to get out before the war’s end. But it was too late for him. He went home, unrecognisable, to die.

In the meantime, his appearance had moved the camp commander to ensure this could not happen again. It was a rare good deed for Henry Wirz, later hanged as a war criminal. But it started a process, run entirely by fellow inmates, in which the guilty were brought to rough justice.

With Wirz’s blessing, a group of vigilantes called the “Regulators” now moved to arrest known raiders. They caught about 100, too many to be tried, so lesser offenders were let off with a “running of the gauntlet”, although that proved fatal too in one case.

Fifteen were given trials. Six, including all of Dowd’s attackers, were hanged, a process watched by the rest of the camp’s 26,000 inmates, with Wexford priest Peter Whelan administering last rites as he had done for so many other prisoners.

Some expressed regret for their crimes. Delaney affected indifference, preferring death to continued incarceration. Collins, tall and well fed, broke his rope when falling and then argued vehemently that it was illegal to hang him again. But they did anyway, successfully this time.

The six are buried at a distance from the thousands of others in Andersonville’s vast war cemetery, occupying their own row of shame. In an added if accidental punishment, for various reasons (including deliberate deception) four of their gravestones have incorrect details.

Dubliner Andrew Muir is listed as “A. Munn”, a misinterpretation of his surname as written in cursive hand. The youngest of the six at 23, he was the only one on the gallows without a beard.

This and his abject remorse earned sympathy from onlookers for the “poor Irish lad”, whose life was a cautionary tale about falling in with bad company.

He was still a free Union soldier at the start of June 1864. Captured on the 2nd, he entered Andersonville on the 7th. Thereafter, his slope was both slippery and steep. Dowd’s beating happened on June 29th. The arrests quickly followed. Muir and the others were hanged in early July.