In the autumn of 1864, Gilliard Dock was writing in the journal he kept, on and off, throughout his life. He, his wife Lavinia, and their children lived in a newly built house on a hillside north of Pine Grove, at the western edge of Schuylkill County.
“The leaves have changed to their autumn tints, some are faded, sere and yellow, fluttering to the ground,” he wrote on October 2. “We have made our house as comfortable as we could and we will get through a dreary winter as best we may I think.”
Dock was supervising construction of a colliery near an abandoned mine at a place called Lorberry, off a spur of the Swatara Donaldson Railroad. His journal is full of doubts that the operation would ever turn a profit. He built it anyway: a mine slope, outbuildings, railroad spurs, and houses for himself and the colliery’s workers.
That autumn, Dock worried about more than just the mine and the oncoming winter. As the Civil War reached its bloody crescendo hundreds of miles away, mine managers across western Schuylkill County traded rumors of masked, armed men moving through the patch towns and mining villages. Pottsville newspaper editor Benjamin Bannan called them “Molly Maguires.”
“The knowledge too that a savage and lawless population is not far off – detracts front the pleasure of country life – and a feeling of vague uneasiness will steal into my musings,” Dock wrote in September. (I’ve written previously about Dock’s anti-Irish sentiment HERE.)
His November 23 entry is more reflective. In it, he laid out his daily routine that fall. It’s easy to picture him walking the workings by day, then settling in on a frosty evening with a book of history. He also turned to the war and politics.
Dock was a Democrat. In October, he traveled to nearby Tremont to vote in the state elections, where, he wrote, he cast “the straight Democratic ticket.” That ticket included Congressman Myer Strouse, an anti-war, anti-abolition Democrat who would vote against the 13th Amendment when it passed the House in January 1865.
Dock very likely voted against President Lincoln in that November’s presidential election as well, though we can’t say for certain. The journal pages covering the days around the presidential election are missing. His daughter likely removed them before donating the journal to the Pennsylvania State Archives, likely out of embarrassment over her father’s contempt for Lincoln. There are other less-than-positive views of Lincoln and his administration elsewhere in the journal.
What survives is the November 23 entry.
In it, Dock connected his reading on the French Revolution to a country now in its fourth year of civil war. His subtext was plain. To Dock, the abolitionists working with Lincoln to end slavery were the heirs of the “restless band of fanatics” who brought on the Terror and planted the seeds of the French Revolution’s own destruction.
Here is Dock’s November 23, 1864, journal entry, from the collections of the Pennsylvania State Archives:
Nov. 23 [1864]
Since our work has drawn near completion, I am not kept so busy as during the summer. My time is passed as follows.
Since the advent of cold weather, we breakfast at 7:30. Before that I go to my stable, feed the horse and cow. After breakfast clean up stable, then light a cigar and start off on the grand rounds.
Generally I first visit the branch road, which I have taken the contract to build, then through the stables, then up to the slope, look into smithshop, up to engine rooms, and top of slope, perhaps take a walk up to the houses under repairs, then back home to attend to correspondence, entries of bills, cash entries, etc. I keep no clerk, but do all the bookkeeping myself.
After dinner, up to the slope again, or to R.R., generally drive to town for letters or packages, getting home after dark.
The drive to town is pleasant enough in good weather, in daytime, but in cold weather, after night – it is very dreary, yet I was never molested but once.
From the middle to the end of each month I have pay day, then check rolls to correct, cash acct. to balance, and statements to send to treasurer in Boston.
This is my general daily routine, having incidental business every day to fill up the intervals.
During my leisure hours I read Thiers “History of the French Revolution” and a very instructive book it is, particularly in view of our own political Complications, and it presents the following striking picture.
The French people, called together in Convention to vote many to a despotic Monarch, take advantage of the situation, assert their natural rights, and demand concessions from power, power is obliged to concede, a Constitution is proposed, framed and forced on the monarch who accepts it then becomes a contract between power and the people.
The “assembly” abolishes distinctions of rank and feudal service, seizes the church properties and imposes the burden of public taxes on all. So far so good, but a restless band of fanatics is not content, the contract with power is broke, the King’s prerogative is assailed, agitation is fomented by the “scum” that rises in revolutionary times. Things go on, from bad to worse, excesses of all kinds are committed, any steps taken to “save the life of the nation” was approved, but after all their revolution came “terrorism,” anarchy, murder, war.
One strong hand again controls France – and the French people have just as much liberty as they deserve…
Featured Image: A mining superintendent in Dauphin County in the 1860s – Williamstown Historical Society
Read more about Gilliard Dock
An angry encounter with General John Reynolds | September 1862
Life of a Coal Mine Superintendent – The Diary of Gilliard Dock, 1867
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