The Irish laborer in the middle nineteenth century frequently found himself in difficulties because of shameless exploitation and bad working conditions, and because of the resentment harbored against him by native Americans who feared his competition; although apparently few Americans had any wish to do the heavy, dirty, unskilled labor that fell to the lot of the Irishman with his pick and shovel.
Newspapers friendly to the Irish immigrant warned him to stay away from the canal and railroad construction projects, for "these railroads have been the ruin of thousands of our poor people", and their workers are treated "like slaves" by the railroad contractors. Wages were low; usually $1.00 a day, but often less; they were not clearly fixed and were paid partly in whiskey and "store pay", or merchandise, sold at high prices.
Friends of the Irish urged them to form protective associations, with objectives somewhat like the trade unions, in order to stop competition, rivalries, and fights between warring gangs that drove wages down in their competition for the available jobs. Above all, the Irish were advised to go to the country to work on farms, or squat upon government land in the West, to "do anything", in fact, in preference to railroading.
Irish longshoremen were employed at the docks in all the leading sea and Lake Ports. They bitterly resented the invasion of the Negroes, who were often brought in expressly to depress the wage scale. Riots between Irish and Negro dock workers were not infrequent. It is this economic competition that helps to explain the strong hostility of the Irish toward the abolitionist movement, and the New York draft riots during the Civil War.
Workers on the Chesapeake Railroad and Ohio Canal were known as the Longfords and Corkonians. On some of the Ohio canals, Irish and German pick-and-shovel workers received only 30 cents a day, with board, lodging, and a "jigger-full" of whiskey. Everywhere, the Irish were doing the hard work, even in the South, where they were so badly treated at one time, that Bishop England found it necessary to publish a warning in Irish newspapers advising Irish workers to avoid the South. Accidents, deaths, and injuries were numerous in road building and canal digging, and cave-ins occurred frequently in excavations for tunnels. Little tumble-down markers in tiny Catholic burying grounds along the route of these internal improvements still bear mute testimony to the hazards of pick-and-shovel work.
In the 1840’s and 1850’s, little "Dublins" sprang up in the factory towns of New England and in the Middle Atlantic states, for the Irish were invading the mill centers. The Irish population of Boston tripled in a decade. Often, the mill population was the residue from the labor supply that had dug the canals, or constructed the millrace. In Rhode Island, for example, the first Irish mill workers were recruited from those who had built the railroad between Providence and Boston, and the Woonsocket Irish Catholic settlement was due to the construction of the Blackstone Canal. Irishmen went into the mill towns of Pawtucket and the "coal pits" between Fall River and Newport.
At first, the competition of Irish labor was resented by other workers. Towns tried to restrict the sale of lots, so as to keep out Catholic purchasers; and the sign "No Irish Need Apply" was posted in some of the factories. The children of the Irish were twitted and abused on the playgrounds and in the schoolyards, much as some Irish children today (1939) join in making life uncomfortable for "dagos", "wops", and "kikes." But the economic urge was irresistible, and the Irish captured the mill towns; only to be, in turn, dispossessed in a later generation by Poles, Italians, French Canadians, and the products of the "new" immigration.
Irish workers had a bad reputation for rioting and brawling, and the newspapers of the middle of the last century are full of graphic accounts of their bloody battles. In 1853, for example, the eviction of an Irishman from a circus performance at Somerset, Ohio, for smoking a pipe, started a battle in which Irish railroad workers fought all night and into the next day. A company of militia had to be called from Zanesville to restore order.
Feuds between groups of Irishmen hailing from different counties in Ireland, led to frequent riots. On one occasion, in Indiana, 400 militia had to be called out to stop an impending assault by several hundred belligerent Irishmen from County Cork. A riot that broke out along the line of a projected Pacific railroad, in 1853, over the election of a foreman of a labor gang, would have had serious consequences, but for the timely intervention of a Roman Catholic priest, who served as peacemaker.
After reading the many accounts of brawling and fighting among Irish workingmen that appear in the American newspapers, one becomes aware of the fact that not all the trouble was due to the Irishman’s belligerent temperament, his love for the bottle, or his belief that contentiousness is the spice of life. Much of this rioting was the result of intolerable labor conditions.
The brawls were often efforts, however misguided and unwise, to achieve an improvement in labor standards at a time when the labor movement had hardly begun. There were strikes for higher wages on internal improvement projects, many of which led to a display of force, particularly when contractors later refused to respect the agreements they had been forced to accept.
In 1840, a serious riot broke out when the wages of Irish laborers on an aqueduct in New York City, were cut from $1.00 to 75 cents a day. There were similar disturbances, caused by wage reductions, on the Illinois Central, the Buffalo and State railroads, the Steubenville and Indiana, and other lines.
The reign of terror instituted by the "Mollie Maguires" in the Anthracite coal regions of Pennsylvania, is well known to students of American history, and is usually described as one of the worst examples of mob rule and blackmail in the whole history of labor relations, for which Irish coal miners are held primarily responsible. Viewed from a longer perspective, the illustration of the battle for better working conditions in the coal producing areas, although the movement fell under the control of criminals, and ended in a number of executions.
The Anthracite coal regions of Pennsylvania had a mushroom growth in the 1830’s, with immigrant labor, poor housing facilities, and all the evils of company towns and company stores as natural concomitants of this rapid expansion. The region suffered from the evils of overdevelopment, and frequent business slumps, which weighed especially heavily upon the Irish coal miners. Working conditions in the mines were terrible; with no safety requirements, inspection, or proper ventilation. From 1839 to 1848, wages were $1.00 to $1.25 a day for miners, and 82 cents a day for ordinary laborers. In 1869, a peak of $18.20 a week was reached, but by 1877, the wage had declined again to $9.80 a week. (This was after the Mollie Maguires organization had been broken up, with multiple hangings.)
"Breaker boys", aged 7 to 16, worked like slaves in the breakers under mine bosses whose character left much to be desired. An editorial in the Boston Pilot exposed conditions in the coal mines; the inadequate pay, the "murderous neglect" of ventilation, the "rancid provisions" available at high prices in company stores, the explosions in the firedamp caverns in which Irish and Welsh miners were blown to pieces, and the "scandalous ungenerosity" subsequently shown by the operators toward their mutilated workmen, and concluded by denouncing some of the owners as men with "the conscience neither of Christian or Pagan".
Irish benevolent societies were formed to deal with some of these problems. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, a semi-secret organization, became the backbone of the miners’ unions. In a very long story of real class war, the responsibility for violence in the Pennsylvania coal fields seems to be pretty well divided. By 1860, the Mollie Maguires terrorized the whole Anthracite region; elected sheriffs and constables, and resorted to arson, blackmail, and murder. The organization was not finally broken up until 1877, when, because of the detective work of James McParlan, 19 were hanged after trials held in an atmosphere of great excitement and prejudice. The incident, for a long time, blackened the record of Irish-Americans, and many refused to see the industrial conditions which had provoked such criminal action. Furthermore, it must be added that the better elements among the Irish population denounced the Mollie Maguires, particularly the Church, which threatened the leaders of this organization with excommunication.
That temperance was a virtue which many Irish immigrants found it hard to cultivate, is abundantly evident from the comments of friendly and sympathetic critics. In 1830, an Irish immigrant wrote home:
"Give my very kind love to Father, and tell him if he was here, he could soon kill himself by drinking, if he thought proper………I can go into a store, and have as much brandy as I like to drink for three half-pence, and all other sprits in proportion."
A part of Charleston, where there were many "low groggeries", was known in the Boston neighborhood as "Dublin Row". In editorials on "the corner grocery", where rum was available at three cents a glass, The New York Times thundered against the prevalence of drunkenness in the 1850’s, but without special reference to the Irish, who were not the only victims of the unregulated American saloon.
It described the "grocery" as: "………a school for murder……….a rotten, crazy-looking wooden tenement with leaking casks and damaged fruit strewn about it; and filled with five or six half-drunken, wholly-brutal men; and youths, on whose lowering brows, vice has set its mark; that it may know them again."
During the height of the nativist disturbances of 1855, an Irish weekly in New York counseled the Irish to abandon "their intemperate habits, their rows, their faction fights." Circulars were issued to immigrants to keep them out of grog shops until the "friends of temperance and good order" could get hold of them.
Clergymen, both Catholic and Protestant, agreed that effective temperate work was the most urgent demand of the times. Many riots of Irish laborers, especially on payday, when drinking began, lasting well into the next day, were attributed to easy access to bountiful supplies of cheap whiskey. Railway passenger cars sometimes were stoned because inebriated Irishmen refused to pay their fares. A Catholic historian denounced the rioting as the manifestations of a "semi-civilized race." Bishop Ireland, decades later, still opposed the American saloon, believing that the Catholic Church should speak out against it, and the liquor dealers and saloonkeepers should be excluded from membership the Catholic societies. Another American leader, in 1841, deplored the fact that "an Irishman and a drunkard had become synonymous terms," and that, "whenever he was to be introduced in character, either on the theatre, or in the pages of the novelist, he should be represented habitated in rags, bleeding at the nose, and waving a shillelagh."
The W. C. T. U., established a generation later, under the leadership of Frances Willard, had a special department for work among the foreign-born. As late as 1881, it maintained that "compulsory education and prohibition of the grog shop will prove the strong hands to lift Patrick from the gutter, and help steady his legs for all time."
The Boston Pilot, a paper under strong Church influence, and a genuine friend of the Irish, denounced the uncleanliness of Irish homes, and the prevalence of the drink evil, which seemed to affect wives and husbands alike. The editor was particularly incensed over the "Paddy funerals," which brought the Irish in Boston and elsewhere into disrepute. Irish "wakes" brought together "a crowd of people drinking and smoking as they would in a common barroom." At funerals, the "boys" frequently remained outside the church smoking and drinking, while the services were going on. Then began the procession to the churchyard --- "a long train of tumble-down vehicles" driven by "brutes." Driving pell-mell, even racing with each other, the procession ran over toll bridges; "the drivers apparently well ‘corned’, and the insiders ditto, and singing or screaming at the top of their lungs." Sometimes there was a race to the grave, and a bloody fight before the body was buried. "We have seen as disgusting a set of savages gathered together to bury a corpse, as could scarcely be matched in any part of the world," complained the enraged editor. He blamed these scenes, to be sure, on Irish "radicals", and called upon the priesthood and Irish-American societies, to put a stop to such ruffianism and vulgar displays; but there is evidence that occasionally, Irish Catholic funerals and wakes in the middle of the last century that had no connection with "radicals" ended in the same disgraceful scenes.
"Out from these narrow lanes, blind courts, dirty streets, damp cellars, and suffocating garrets, will come forth some of the noblest sons of our country, whom she will delight to own and honor."