The United States has been known and ridiculed as a nation of "joiners". One reason may be the large immigrant element, which has had it special incentives in a new land to form benevolent, patriotic, and social organizations to keep alive the memories of a common origin. The Irish were no exception, and Irish societies of many kinds; such as the Hibernians, athletic clubs, and sodalities, exist in large numbers, generally closely connected with the Church and the Catholic hierarchy.
In the years of the heavy Irish migration, just before the Civil War, military companies were extremely popular in the United States, and every important immigrant group had them. They satisfied a love for military drill, gaudy uniforms, and display; but, above all, they provided the excuse for arranging many a convivial occasion that gratified the social instincts of a good-natured, friendly, and hospitable people. Irish militia companies under various names; such as "the Jasper Greens", "the Hibernia Greens", "the Napper Tandy Light Artillery", "the Emmett Guards", "the Irish Rifles", and "the Jackson Guards"; sprang up even in the smaller towns, and attracted much newspaper comment by their frequent parading. Some served valiantly in the Mexican War, although most of them were organized in the following decade.
In New York, in 1852, the 9th regiment with 350 members; the 69th, with 280; the Emmett Guards, with 68; the Shields Guard of Brooklyn; the Irish-American Guard; and the Mitchell Light Guard, of New York; paraded at the Battery, and were reviewed by the Irish exile Thomas Francis Meagher. In 1853, the Irish militia of New York City numbered 2,600; and the German companies, 1,700. There were also a "Garde Lafayette," in which commands were given in French. These companies usually wore uniforms of gaudy colors, trimmed in red and gold. Some had bearskin caps, with plumes of red and green. The 4th of July was an especially popular day for parades. It was then that visits were exchanged between companies in different cities, accompanied with much conviviality and banqueting.
Parades and balls seemed to be especially appropriate, too, on St. Patrick’s Day. On these occasions, the parades were generally reviewed by mayors and city councils; and at the banquets, the toasts were eloquent, and the punch bowls full. Although Irish leaders urged Irish immigrants to get military training and discipline, occasionally a voice was raised in criticism of the formation of separate companies and regiments based on racial origins, on the ground that this would contribute to the perpetuation of immigrant stocks as separate nationalities.
For many years, fire fighting in the United States was in the hands of volunteer companies. The opportunity to become a "fire laddy" was irresistible for many Irishmen. These companies performed superhuman feats of strength and heroism. Each firehouse, especially in large cities like New York, also attracted a group that ran along to every fire, so that "running with the machine" eventually degenerated into a sport which attracted the hoodlums and gangs of the Bowery districts. The volunteer fireman of the 1840’s and later decades, appeared in brilliant uniforms and ponderous equipment of the comic opera variety. Much feasting and drinking seemed to be a part of the routine of these organizations, and until the temperance movement made its inroads upon the profession, companies frequently had a steward, whose business it was to ladle out liquor to exhausted firemen, from a barrel hauled along with the engine to each fire.
When an alarm sounded, the rivalry between the companies was likely to be so keen, that a race was started for the only fire plug available in the neighborhood of the conflagration. Specially competent fighters raced ahead to capture the hydrant or cistern, and to hold it at all costs until their colleagues arrived with the machine.
Feuds and brawls were frequent, and occasionally a building burned to the ground while the heroic "fire laddies" were settling their long standing rivalries. In 1845, the Philadelphia commissioners reduced the annual appropriations for fire companies because of their turbulent and riotous conduct. But, nine years later, a lively battle was fought in the "City of Brotherly Love", between Irish Catholic and Irish Protestants fire companies. In 1860, there was another battle royal of firemen in New York, involving several companies, "with stones, trumpets, and pistols. A dozen were carried off to the hospital........The end will be," predicted the editor of The Boston Pilot, "a paid department, acting as a branch of the police." After the close of the Civil War, the volunteer system of fire fighting was gradually abandoned in the larger cities.
How the Irish established themselves on the police force of the American cities needs no discussion. As late as 1933, a study of the New York force revealed that, out of a total of approximately 20,000 policemen, 2.309 were themselves foreign-born, and 11,014 were of foreign-born parentage, representing 42 countries in all. Ireland led the list of foreign-born policemen, with 1,533; and also the list of those of foreign-born parentage, with 5,671.
Nearly all that has been said hitherto, has concerned the Irish immigrant as a city dweller. It has been shown that most Irishmen began as unskilled laborers, working in construction gangs on the docks, in the streets; or, with the rise of industrial towns like Lowell and Patterson, in the mills, wherever brawn and not skill was the chief requirement. Many ended their days as unskilled workers in the cities and towns. But, although it is rare that the Irish immigrant is primarily a phenomenon of urban civilization in the United States, some did go into agriculture. Students of immigration have speculated on the reasons why a predominantly rural people should have shunned the land in their new home. Poverty, of course, made it impossible for large numbers to leave the port towns in which the immigrant ships happened to land them.
Ignorance of improved American methods of farming was another reason, along with memories of bitter experiences on the land of Ireland. Irish gregariousness and the incentive of cash wages in the city were other factors. In some cases, the demoralizing effects of the saloons and political clubs in the cities operated to keep Irishmen from moving West.
Wherever he went, the Irishman was likely to remain wasteful and generous; helping his neighbor, whoever he was, when in dirties; sighing in his soul for the Emerald Isle across the sea, and always willing to help those whom he had left behind. Along with these qualities, went another--- namely, the desire to be with people. This could not be satisfied on a farm. A successful Irish farmer in Missouri expressed the feelings of many of his countrymen, when he wrote home in 1821, that, in spite of all the advantages America has to offer, in Ireland, after a day’s work, he could attend a fair, a wake, or a dance; or he could sit with a neighbor by a cheering turf fire. "If I had there but a sore head," he continued, "I would have a neighbor within every hundred yards of me that would run to see me. But here, everyone can get so much land, and generally has so much, that they calls them neighbors that lives two or three miles off........" Adams has estimated that, before 1845, when the heaviest Irish migration began, about 10 per cent of the immigrants went into agriculture. No reliable figures can be cited for the later period, but there is no dearth of evidence to show that Irish farming communities were not an unknown quantity in the American West of the last century.
As early as 1818, several Irish societies in the Eastern cities petitioned Congress for a land grant in Illinois; where land should be sold to Irish only, on 14 years credit, in order to build on the prairies a "new and happy Erin in the bosom of the West." Congress refused.
In 1845, at the fourth annual meeting of the Irish Emigrant Society, speculators who had New York real estate to unload, put up placards advising immigrants to stay out of "the sickly West." McGee, on the other hand, wrote a poem celebrating the attractions of Illinois; and, in 1856, was instrumental in bringing about an Irish Emigrant Aid Convention, composed of 80 lay and clerical delegates in Buffalo. Its purpose was to found an Irish state under the surveillance of the Church, somewhere in the West, or in Canada. Irish-Americans of means were to form stock companies to buy land, which they were then to re-sell on the installment plan to poor immigrants. The program collapsed mainly because no one was available to push it through, and partly because the Eastern clergy were lukewarm, even hostile, to the proposal. It was often charged, and with some justification, that some of the priests were promoting the clannishness of the Irish, and keeping them from going West so as to be the better able to hold their parishes together; to maintain parochial schools for the children of their parishioners, and to protect them against the "insidious advances of heresy." It was argued that the spiritual wants of Catholic communities could best be satisfied when large groups lived in compact settlements in the larger towns.
McGee’s Celt and The Boston Pilot waged a long journalistic battle over this issue before McGee finally gave up his residence in the United States in disgust, and went to Canada. The Celt maintained that the Irish were losing their religion in the United States because, in the public schools, they came in contact with "infidel companions" who ridiculed "Paddy-boys", "Paddy-churches", and "Paddy religion." The Pilot, as a rule, opposed a Westward movement of the Irish, and believed the Roman Catholic faith could best be nurtured in the cities. As for the proposed Irish migration to Canada, that immediately encountered the hostility of militant Canadian Protestants like George Brown of the Toronto Globe, who denounced the whole plan as a "deep scheme of Roman Priestcraft to colonize Upper Canada with papists......with no schools, no roads, and no progress." For decades after the Civil War, clerical leaders like Bishop Spalding and Archbishop Ireland worked on plans to settle the Irish in Western farming communities; and, in 1874, Thomas Butler wrote The Irish on the Prairie, in which he forecast a New Ireland which will "plant all the joys of the Old Land amidst the bright scenes of the New."
Thousands of Irish workers on canals and railroads did eventually settle down as farmers along the routes they had helped to develop. This was particularly true in Illinois, where Irish farmers settled along the canal from Peoria northward, although Chicago remained an irresistible attraction for many who found the farm too lonely and dull. In 1860, there were over 87,000 Irish in Illinois, and 32,000 more settled in this prairie state within the next decade. Although thousands drifted to the cities, there was not a rural county in the state that did not have Irish among its farming population. In McHenry county, for example, there was an Irish farming settlement that supported three good-sized Catholic Churches. An item in The Boston Transcript, in 1855, reported the departure of ten Irish families from Newburyport, for Illinois, with capital resources of from $300 to $1500 per family; with which they proposed to buy land. The trustees of the Wabash and Erie Canal offered immigrants and laborers farms of 40, 80, and 160 acres on easy terms, in partial payment for work done on the canal. The Illinois Central Railroad was built largely by German and Irish immigrant labor. The workers were frequently paid in scrip, which they exchanged for farmland. The Irish bought thousands of acres of Illinois Central land, although a statement in the Illinois State Register, in 1853, to the effect that three fourths of the Irish who were employed on public lands in Illinois from 1833 to 1853 took up homesteads is probably an exaggeration many Irish railroad workers settled down as farmers in Will County and in LaSalle, Illinois.
A letter in The Boston Pilot, for August 4th, 1860 described the beginning of an Irish agricultural settlement in Allegaw County, Michigan. Kentucky had been proposed as a "New Ireland" as early as 1795. In Iowa, there were Irish Catholic farming communities near Council Bluffs and an Irish settlement called "Garryowen," in Jackson County. The Boston Pilot had many subscribers among Catholic settlers, asking that a priest be sent out to care for their religious needs. In 1860, there was a Corpus Christi procession in Dubuque, Iowa, attended largely by German and Irish settlers, and the Trappist Monastery near Dubuque was a center of Catholic worship for Irish farmers, who came in from the neighborhood, to attend Mass.
In Wisconsin, the Irish, unlike the Germans, did not consciously form farm colonies, but turned to the land usually after their internal improvement jobs had been completed. There were 21,000 Irish in Wisconsin in 1850, and 50,000 in 1860. In Kenosha County, for example, there were 1,209 Irish in 1850, of whom 656 were in the rural communities. A decade later, the number had risen to 718. In the rural county of Racine, Wisconsin, there were 609 Irish in 1850. After a painstaking study of four Wisconsin counties, Dr. Joseph Schafer came to the conclusion that the Irish represented a relatively fluid element between farm and city, and generally withdrew from communities where the German predominated. Where the Irish did settle down, they proved to be just as good farmers as anybody else, although they were likely to move and develop several farms and homes within a lifetime; in contrast to the Germans, who usually settled but once. In Ozankee County, where Irish farmers settled among the Germans, many of them spoke German.
In South Dakota, an eccentric Sioux City newspaperman planned to bring Irish-Americans to homesteads in the Dakotas, so that they might be ready to strike at England through Canada whenever "England’s embarrassment and Ireland’s opportunity" should come. In Holt County, Nebraska, the Irish settlers of O’Neill City, named after the Irish Fenian General John O’Neill, had a similar purpose in inviting their fellow countrymen to join them in Nebraska. O’Neill offered lots for sale, and denounced the clergy, politicians, and saloonkeepers, for trying to keep the Irish in the cities. There were Irish agricultural colonies in at least six Nebraska counties by the 1880’s. Other successful colonies were established in Kansas, Arkansas, Virginia, and Georgia.
Bishops Joseph Cretin of St. Paul; Mathias Loras of Dubuque; and Fenwich and Burne were all interested in promoting the settlement of Irish upon farms; but no leaders of the Church could be compared in enthusiasm for such projects with Bishop Spalding of Peoria, and Archbishop Ireland of St. Paul. Besides wishing to raise the moral and economic level of Irish communities, these leaders of the Church felt that their faith could best be maintained by taking the Irish out of the cities. Certain publications in the Eastern cities were held responsible for leading some Irish Catholics into "the school of socialism" and getting them to join labor unions, which might lead to "communistic infidelity." Considerable friction and rivalry developed between Western and Eastern bishops because of these colonization projects, for they involved a fundamental conflict of interest between West and East. Clergymen in well-established Eastern parishes, with large churches and schools --- some of them still in debt--- naturally opposed any movement which would deprive them of their membership. Archbishop Hughes of New York was always a vigorous opponent of colonization projects.
Bishop Ireland planted his fist colony in Swift County, Minnesota, in 1876. He himself selected the tract, and the railroad company which owned it gave him the exclusive right of disposal for three years. He sent in a priest and built a church in the settlement before the settlers arrived. The railroad company furnished the lumber for the houses. The settlement was widely advertised to attract Irish to the new region. No saloon was permitted in the community, and a temperance society was promptly organized. Organizations like the St. Paul Catholic Colonization Bureau, the Irish Catholic Colonization Association, and the Irish-American Colonization Company combined their energies to find recruits. In 1879, a convention was called in Chicago under the stimulus of Bishop Ireland and other clergy; and notices were sent to Irish Catholic Societies and Irish Catholic papers like the St. Paul Northwestern Chronicle, the Notre Dame Ave Maria, The Boston Pilot, the Brooklyn Catholic Review, and the New York Irish American.
The Irish Catholic Colonization Association of the United States was incorporated under Illinois law, with a capital stock of $100,000, and a board of directors composed of three bishops, two priests, and four Catholic laymen. As president, Bishop Spalding made a tour of the East to sell stock, but subscriptions totaled only $83,000, coming largely from the relatively poor, who could take but one or two shares apiece. Colonies were established in Nobles County, Minnesota, on land of the Northern Pacific Railroad; and in Greeley County, Nebraska, on land of the Burlington and Missouri road. In each case, settlers were to pay for their holdings in easy payments. In its first five years, the society paid 17 per cent dividends, and in 1884 it paid for a resident priest assigned to Castle Garden. The colonies were successful, and the company was dissolved in 1891.
In 1881, Bishop Ireland’s colony in Swift County, Minnesota, had 800 families in four villages. Eventually, Irish agricultural settlements in this vicinity spread over 300,000 acres. The land for Adrian, in Nobles County, was secured by the Archbishop from the railroad, and was sold at a profit. The total cost to an Adrian colonist for a 160 acre farm, a house, and the breaking of 30 acres, was $1,174, which the settler paid back in installments over a number of years. The railroads and land agents worked in close co-operation with representatives of Archbishop Ireland, Bishop Spalding, and the Irish Catholic Colonization Association. Minnesota had its Shieldsville, an Irish colony named after General James Shield, the Irish hero of the Mexican War; as well as its Killhenny, Erin, and Montgomery townships, little islands of Irish agricultural settlements which successfully withstood the Scandinavian inundation of the Northwest. In Arkansas, along the line of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, there were Irish farming colonies in Perry and Yell Counties, and Bishop Fitzgerald predicted that "St. Patrick’s Colony" would succeed, provided "the same thrift, enterprise, energy, and intelligence" were applied "as shown by the Germans."
The importance of the Irish in the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, and the role of the Church in the life of Irish-Americans are so generally recognized, that the statement that the Catholic Church in America became essentially an immigrant Church in the 1840’s, and continued for decades to receive its strongest additions from abroad, will hardly be challenged by anyone familiar with the facts. There were Roman Catholics in America at the time of the Revolution, but they were under special disabilities in a number of the American colonies. The first great accession of Roman Catholics came from the purchase of Louisiana, which brought into the America Church about 100,000 communicants. Others came in with the annexations following the Mexican War, but none of these additions can be remotely compared in importance with the great flood of Irish who came across the Atlantic in the 1840’s and later decades.
Lay and clerical leaders have testified to the special mission of the Irish to preserve and spread Roman Catholicism in the United States. "What Ireland has done for the America Church, every Bishop, every priest can tell," wrote Maguire in 1867, in his book The Irish in America. "There is scarcely an ecclesiastical seminary for English speaking students", he added, "in which the great majority of those now preparing for the service of the sanctuary, do not belong, if not by birth, at least by blood, to that historic land to which the grateful Church of past ages accorded the proud title, Insula Sanctorum." "We must at once admit," said Bishop Spalding, "that the Irish race is the providential instrument through which God has wrought this marvelous revival," by which Catholicism in the United States was given "vigor and cohesiveness." And Bishop McQuaid of Rochester contended that, of all Europeans, the Irish are....... "best fitted to open the way for religion in a new country..... They were not appalled by the wretchedness of religious equipments and surroundings in their new homes on this side of the Atlantic......... They had lived among the bitterest foes, and had never quailed or flinched....... In such a school of discipline, they have been trained to do missionary work......"
Moreover, the belief that large numbers of Irish left the Roman Church after coming to America is now discredited. The Irish remained faithful sons and daughters of Mother Church.
It has been estimated that there were 30,000 adherents of the Roman Catholic faith in the United States by 1790. By 1830, the Church claimed 600,000 and, by 1860, 4,500,000 members. Both figures are probably too large. The Metropolitan Catholic Almanac of 1852 listed 1,980,000 Catholics in the United States. By that time, there were Catholic newspapers in nine of the leading cities, and Catholic publishing houses in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
In New York State, in 1829, there were 13 Roman Catholic churches, 5 of them in New York and Brooklyn. The number of communicants more than doubled in the next decade, and, by 1830, Protestant clergymen of New York were inveighing against the menace of the Pope in America. In 1836, the diocese of New York and half of New Jersey contained about 200,000 Catholics, and of the 38 priests, 35 were Irish, and 3 German. The Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Paris, the Leopoldine Foundation of Vienna, and the Bavarian Ludwig Verein sent money and vestments to the United States in order to help establish Catholic parishes. Baltimore was still referred to as "the Rome of the United States," although there were now 4 new dioceses in the West: Cincinnati, 1823; St. Louis, 1827; Mobile, 1825; and Michigan, 1823. In 1835, the Boston diocese embraced 26 churches, and the New York diocese, 19; and Catholic religious Orders showed a steady growth. In 1852, there were 6 archbishops, 26 bishops, and 1,385 priests in the United States. The rapid expansion of the Church was due almost entirely to Irish; and, to a lesser extent, to German Catholic immigration.
The creation of new Roman Catholic parishes paralleled closely the spread of Irish laborers along canal routes and other internal improvement projects. John Power, an Irish priest, preached to Irish laborers along the canals of New York and Connecticut in the 1840’s. Churches like the one in Utica, New York, were started to serve Irish workers on the Erie Canal. The first St. Patrick’s Day banquet was held in Utica in 1821. The Erie Canal was described as "a capital road from Cork to Utica." In Ohio, the establishment of new parishes followed the building of the Ohio canals, turnpikes, and railroads. By 1846, President Polk was appointing Roman Catholic chaplains to accompany the Irish volunteers who had enlisted for the Mexican War. In 1846, according to The Boston Pilot, there were 740 churches and 737 priests in the United States; by 1854, there were 1,712 churches, 7 archbishops, 32 bishops, and 1,574 priests. Already there was considerable maneuvering within the church with regard to the filling of vacant bishoprics, "to prevent the growing power of the Irish clergy in the United States." But the Irish control of the Catholic hierarchy in America remained unchecked.
The rapid transformation of New England into a Roman Catholic stronghold was especially striking. Early Boston had been no paradise for Catholics. The first Catholic Church in Boston was dedicated in 1803, and the first bishop of Boston, the Rev. John de Cheverus, appointed in 1810. Bishop Fenwick, sent to Boston in 1825, proved to be a vigorous, broad-gauged leader. He started a parochial school in 1827. By 1835, there were 40,082 Catholics in the New England diocese. In New England, as in the West, the rise of Roman Catholic parishes can easily be traced by following a map for internal improvements projects, and the establishment of mill towns. Thus, the church at Windsor Locks, near Hartford, Connecticut, was founded because of the excavation of a canal by Irish workmen. The organization of the Norwich church followed the construction and opening of the Worcester and Norwich road. Woonsocket, Rhode Island, got its Catholic population by drawing workers from the Irish immigrants. The Westfield Canal and railroad building in that region developed Catholic congregations west of the Connecticut River. These Irish Catholic settlements and churches encountered violent prejudices at the outset, and Irish laborers frequently were excluded from New England boarding houses.
In Lowell, Massachusetts, the first Irish workmen arrived in 1822 to build a canal. They were followed by hundreds, who at first, lived only in tents in a district known as "Paddy Camp Lands." By 1831, there was a settlement of 500 Irish in 100 cabins on a strip of land near Lowell, known as New Dublin. There were the usual complaints of heavy drinking and much brawling, and a priest was brought in to steady the workers. The first church was built on land donated by the mill owners. Apparently, the company had no scruples about contributing from its treasury for the support of the steadying influence which priests and churches were believed to have, on the turbulent, undisciplined community. In 1833, a Hibernian Moralizing and Relief Society was organized in Lowell, which developed into the Lowell Irish Benevolent Society. In 1849, Father Matthew visited the community to give new life to its Catholic Temperance Society. The history of the Lowell community, as far as the rise and influence of the Catholic Church is concerned, is typical of many New England mill towns. After 1845, Irish immigrants rapidly drove the daughters of New England farmers out of the factories. The Irish bandmaster, Patrick S. Gilmore, is said to have composed "Seeing Nellie Home", as a result of his romance with Nellie O’Neill, who sang in the choir of Lowell’s St. Patrick’s Church, which was dedicated in 1831.
As the Irish element grew in numbers, and its churches and parochial schools multiplied, it was perhaps unavoidable that friction should develop between militant Protestants and militant Catholics; between the champions of a public school system and those who favored Church schools. This controversy reached its most violent stage in the bigotry and barbarity of the Native American and Know-Nothing agitations, to be discussed later as a part of the nativist reaction to immigration. In New York, Bishop Hughes fought for a division of school funds for the support of Roman Catholic schools. Governor Seward supported him, and was politically embarrassed forever after by his stand on that occasion. He was denounced by Whigs and Democrats alike for preparing the way "for the whore of Babylon."
Controversies arose over the reading of the Bible in schools, and over textbooks to which Roman Catholics objected as being unfriendly and unfair to Catholicism. Such controversies led to an acute fear in some quarters of the growing influence of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. In the meantime, Catholic papers like The Boston Pilot unwisely printed questionable stories reflecting on the conduct of Protestant ministers, calling them "Simoniacs to a man" and "the most venal people in the land," and denouncing "mixed marriages" and "foreign anarchists," all in one breath. In the latter category were included all German, French, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Irish radicals in the United States. In violent editorials, this journal lashed out against the "common schools," opposed compulsory school laws as invasions of the rights of the Church and the family, and referred to "Ignorance, Atheism, and Disobedience" as the "three apples of Sodom, plucked from this tree of State education." To provide higher education for Catholics, the Church sponsored St. Louis University, Xavier University, the University of Notre Dame, Fordham University, the College of the Holy Cross, Villanova College, Loyola University, Georgetown University, and numerous female seminaries. Catholic books, dealing largely with matters of faith, were extensively advertised in Catholic papers. When Brownson’s Quarterly Review criticized the standards and the curricula of Catholic colleges, The Pilot heatedly denied the charges, adding that "there would be fewer Garibaldians, fewer Mazzinians, fewer scoundrels in Italy, if there were in that devoted country less colleges and more plain common schools........"
Devout Irishmen, of course, followed their clerical leaders in matters of religion and religious education. In politics, they learned to follow the orders of the ward boss. The latter’s affiliations generally were more intimate with the saloon, than with the Church. To an Irishman, politics proved to be the salt and breath of life, and Irishmen in America found it hard to resist the temptation to plunge at once, and deeply, into the America political stream. They learned the tricks of the political game from native America leaders, and then rapidly improved on their instruction. From the first, Irish allegiance was to the Democrats. The name itself had its allure. "Federalist" and "Whig" were names that had little significance for an immigrant who had come to the United States to enjoy freedom and democracy. Moreover, both Federalists and Whigs were suspected, with much truth, of a nativism that frowned upon the newcomer; seeking to protect America institutions from the inundation’s from abroad, and opposed to the easy and quick naturalization of foreigners. Irishmen had little in common with the "Anglomen and monocrats" who supported Federalists and Whigs. Posing as friends of the poor, the Democrats, in the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, opened their hearts to the immigrants, and sought to win and hold their support by admitting them at once to the inner sanctuary and to the minor spoils of the America political system. Irishmen generally had an ingrained hatred for aristocracy and long-standing reasons to be "agin the government."
By the year 1820, Tammany Hall was Irish. Tammany celebrations toasted Ireland’s sons and their patron saint, St. Patrick, and Tammany used its charities to win and to hold the immigrant vote.
A regiment of well-drilled Irish voters, once organized in any of the larger port towns, was able to enlist new arrivals among the immigrants as soon as they landed. The Irish usually were more interested in local political issues than in national questions, but thorough organization in the local communities led to party solidarity on any issue that might arise. Needless to say, immigrants favored universal manhood suffrage, and the Democratic leaders championed what their supporters wanted. A deliberately cultivated Anglophobia helped to preserve Irish unity. Irish wit and adaptability, a gift for oratory, a certain vivacity; and a warm, human quality that made them the best of good fellows at all times--- especially in election campaigns--- enabled the Irish to rise rapidly from ward heelers to city bosses, and to municipal and state officers of high distinction.
The Irish added turbulence and excitement to political campaigns. They also contributed a new picturesqueness and dramatic quality to the methods of political campaigning and canvassing the vote of large masses of people. By building up strong political machines in the cities, they became, along with the Solid South, the one stable element that kept the Democratic party---then a minority group--- alive after the Civil War, and gave it its occasional chance for victory. Reformers have often overlooked the fact that the same political boss who bought votes, stuffed ballot boxes, and brazenly perpetrated naturalization frauds, was also the warm-hearted leader who got the immigrant his pushcart license, "fixed" arrests, and sent the poor their Christmas turkeys, and coal in the winter; paid their rent when the landlord threatened eviction; and sent flowers to their funerals. Indeed, some political bosses contended that they were public benefactors, for they took money out of the public till to help bring about a fairer distribution of this world’s pleasures among the underprivileged.
In 1852, a poem addressed to the Irishmen of the United States, began with the admonition:
"Fellow exiles, claim your station,
In the councils of the nation.
Be not aliens in the soil,
Which extracts your sweat and toil;
For this land your fathers fought,
With their blood was freedom bought.
We can boast as brave a stock,
As that which sprung from Plymouth Rock.........."
The admonition seems to have been utterly unnecessary, if one may judge from the turmoil raised in native America self-government. No other immigrant group has ever taken so quickly and completely to the America political system, especially as it functioned through the machine politics of the larger America cities. By nature, the Irishman seems to have possessed many of the qualities that make for a successful politician. To be sure, he began on a low level in the United States, but there was no other level on which he could begin. His flair for oratory and good fellowship was an invaluable asset as he began the slow ascent on the America political escalator, from ward heeler, to United States Senator and Cabinet Member.
Hostile critics of the Irish-American voters, who huddled like cattle in the early shantytowns, believed they knew the reason why "Paddy" would not leave the city for the farm. "They would then lose the glory of having a Paddy O’Bluster in one office," bitterly commented one observer in 1839, "a Rory McWhackem in another; a Tearaway Batterscull in a third....... They might then bid farewell to the sublime delights of a shillelagh row at election times"------and brandy!
The Irish worker was described in doggerel verse that reflected his importance to the machine that sought his vote,
"He slowly moves his rake, and swings his pick with easy sweep,
Seeming to be not quite awake, and yet not sound asleep.
We gazed upon the dreamy scene, and of its beauty wrote,
And could not help but realize the power of a vote."
Another selection in this early anthology of Irish vote-selling, graft, and rioting described the landing of Barney O’Toole, "a broth of a boy," in the New Canaan. He got a job immediately in one of the city parks, only to conclude, after swinging his pick for a day, that he was meant to be a judge.
"Then he lit up his pipe and he put on his coat,
And he ran for an office; they counted the vote.
And they figured it out by the Tammany rule,
And who was elected, but Barney O’Toole.
Then he bought a new coat and a diamond so fine,
And a lad for five cents give his boots a nice shine.
Then he talked about court, legislation and school,
For he now was a statesman, bold Barney O’Toole."
References to the plug-ugly methods of the 1850’s were frequent; and the Irishman, though by no means solely responsible for the shoulder-hitting methods of American city politics, came in for more than his share of criticism. Witness the following stanza, printed in 1871, when apparently the good old days were passing:
"Where are now the Roughs I cherished
Where the voters I once called mine?
Some too much rum have perished;
Some the prison walls confine.
Voting early, voting often;
Voting morning, noon and night.
And ready, always ready,
For a riot or a fight."
As the risk of painting the lily, reference may be made in concluding this part of the discussion, to probably the most stinging satire in rhyme ever written about the Irish immigrant who voted immediately upon arrival, and was charged with polluting the pure stream of American political life. This immigrant epic was the work of one "Blarney O’Democrat". It was written in 1839, telling in 71 pages of indignant, scurrilous verse, the story of the Irish-Office-Hunter-Oniad. The scene is the sixth ward of old New York, the home of dirty, illiterate, swearing, whiskey-drinking Irish Democrats.
"Who thinks that freedom most consists
In proving points, with sticks and fists."
It is here that "clubs have softened many a head." At a political rally, the first speaker, who regrets that he has not been christened Patrick, proves to his Irish hearers that all good things in America came from Ireland, and that Christopher Columbus himself was an Irishman.
"And hence, America, yea ken,
Of right belongs to Irishmen!
And Washington, I’ve understood,
Was somewhat touch’d with Irish blood."
The third speaker is a German.... "gaunt and grim; with a bushel head and lamppost limb," who regrets that he has not been born in Ireland. Nevertheless, like a good Jacksonian Democrat, he hates all things aristocratic with sufficient violence to make him acceptable. Another Irishman, who is ashamed of the whole performance, arises at the meeting to urge his fellow countrymen to leave the city for the farm. He is listened to respectfully until he uses the fatal words:
"Seek for public posts no more."
At that point, his exhortation is rudely ended by the application of a shillelagh to his muddled Irish head. Perhaps the climax of political oratory is reached when the greatest classical orator of New York’s bloody sixth ward, arises to contrast the weakling leaders of antiquity with the bosses of the "bloody sixth":
"There’s Homer, boys, who lived in Spain,
And wrote of Shakespeare, and Tom Paine;
There’s Joan of Arc, the queen of might,
Whom Caesar poisoned out of spite;
There’s Hellespont, so might fine,
Who lived in Ovid, near the Rhine,
And swam across the pyramid,
To seek Leander, who was hid;
There’s Brutus, who would never yield,
But beat the French at Flodden field;
There’s Hector, who was dipt in Styx,
(A wood the ancients used to mix.)
Which left him so, he could not feel,
Till Hotspur shot him in the heel;
And there are fifty more, no doubt,
All scholars famed, and heroes stout,
But what are they, with all their riches,
Their ancient deeds, and foreign speeches;
Merely a pack of sons of bitches,
Compared to one, we all should study,
The leader of the sixth, so bloody!"
This epic comes to a dramatic close when a disappointed Irish office-seeker breaks the calm and harmony of the political rally, by threatening to eat meat again, and to join the Whigs. Immediately, fists began to fly. The rally ends in a terrible fight.
"For every man in that ring,
Fought like a true Milisian King."
The description of this fight is a classic, but cannot be reproduced here. The epic ends on a significant note --- all appear to be better friends than ever, once Irish inhibitions have been completely leased:
"Three Hodmen, with their grimy faces,
Were in three lawyer’s fond embraces;
Three Magistrates, in corner handy,
With paupers three, were drinking brandy;
And all the various rest: Inspectors,
Custom-house Officers, Tax Collectors;
Constables, Editors, Tavern-Keepers;
Loafers and Nightmen, and Street sweepers;
Sat in a ring, like brother and brother,
All making love to one another!
And meeter companions were never together,
All peats of one turf-bog, and birds of one feather."
There was sufficient measure of truth in these exaggerated effusions in rhyme to indicate how many Americans reacted to the role played by the Irish immigrant in American politics. On the other hand, it may be said that American cities were not any too well governed before the foreigners came. Philadelphia, for example, with fewer foreigners by far than New York or Boston, has never been a model of civic virtue; and many native American bosses have been of fine Anglo-Saxon lineage. There can be no doubt that American city government became more complicated and difficult to administer because of the immigrant vote. But, as the late James Bryce, who certainly was not under any misapprehension about the evils of city government in the United States, wrote:
"New York was not an Eden before the Irish came, and would not become an Eden were they all to move on to San Francisco....... There is a disposition in the United States to use immigrants, and especially the Irish, much as the cat is used in the kitchen to account for broken plates and food which disappears."
In 1809, Tammany Hall, which claimed to be thoroughly "native", put up an Irish Catholic for office. Nevertheless, in the first third of the nineteenth century, the Wigwam of the Tammany Society was regarded by the Irish as the home of bigotry and 100 per cent Americanism. By the late 1830’s, however, Tammany was effectively wooing the immigrants. For one thing, it opened a bureau to aid them in becoming naturalized. In 1834, the Whigs of New York complained that Irishmen, armed with stones and bludgeons, had driven their voters from the polls. The New York Truth Teller, an Irish paper, was subsidized by the Democratic Party. In the 1840’s, thousands of Irishmen were naturalized, at reduced court fees, by Tammany judges who signed their citizenship papers without question, provided applicants were sponsored by the right party bosses. It was charged that prisoners were released from jail on Election Day to march to the polls under the banner of Tammany. Petty jobs on public works provided the immigrant with the necessary incentive to remain loyal to the "ward heeler". The saloon, an ally of the machine politician, became the rendezvous for loafers and bruisers, who were prepared, at a moment’s notice, to stuff a ballot box, or seize control of the polling place. Meetings were generally held by ward politicians in the saloons, which were the only clubs where the poor immigrant was welcome. Francis Lieber, in 1835, deplored as dangerous to the American system the many special appeals at election time addressed solely to the "true-born sons of Ireland," who thus were encouraged to maintain a kind of dual political allegiance, to the old, as well as the new fatherland.
Although there were earlier instances when political observers credited the immigrant vote with special importance, as in the national election of 1844, when the Whig press attributed the success of Polk in New York State to the votes of 10,000 Irishmen employed on internal improvement works, the national election campaign of 1852 was really the first in American political history in which both parties made a systematic effort to win the German and Irish vote which recent immigration had made a prize well worth seeking. General Winfield Scott, "Old Fuss and Feathers," the Whig candidate for President, found it especially necessary to court the immigrant vote because of a letter he had written more than ten years earlier to the American party of Philadelphia, in which he had expressed sympathy for nativist principles. In his campaign speeches, the General referred feelingly to the "rich brogue of the Irish , and the foreign accent of the German," which reminded him of the battlefields of the Mexican War, where these people had so loyally fought the battles of their adopted fatherland. To make doubly sure of his strategy, Scott attended Mass on a Sunday morning, and Protestant services in the evening. Because the Democrats, with Pierce as their standard-bearer, were suspected of low-tariff leanings, the Whig New York Tribune tried to shake the traditional allegiance of the Irish by the query: "Will Irishmen support a British policy?" The Boston Pilot, however, remained neutral in the campaign, contending that neither Scott nor Pierce could do anything especially significant for Catholics. The editor resented appeals for the "Catholic vote," and deplored "the alarming increase of small Irish politicians," job seekers, and "Customs House Catholics." The Irishman, a Scott paper published by the Whigs of New York, was denounced as "an insult to both native and adopted citizens." Horace Greeley’s "excessive tenderness" for Catholics in general, and for those of Franklin Pierce’s home state of New Hampshire, whose constitution still retained anti-Catholic features, in particular was dismissed as "a stale trick." Above all, Catholic editors of papers like The Pilot, saw in Whiggism of 1852, a certain radical "Free-Soilism," which they believed was analogous to the anticlerical radicalism of Europe. Radicalism, whether by native Americans or immigrants, was regarded as the greatest menace to republican institutions, and its exponents were advised to make "an early visit to the confessional."
There is little evidence to show that the immigrant vote in 1852 had decisive effects. Indeed, there is little evidence that the appeal to the immigrant vote was ever decisive in the long annals of American party battles, with the possible exception of one or two campaigns. Nevertheless, there has not been a national campaign since 1852 in which the political parties have not made a conscious bid for the immigrant vote by playing especially upon either the pride or the prejudices of immigrant groups. The election of 1852, especially in New York, was spirited. Fists and paving block seem to have been as effective as ballots in a battle in which electors were "hurled into the street without vestige of clothing;" hundreds received broken bones, and the police collected a "cart-load of bludgeons" in one ward alone. After the shouting and the tumult were over, however, The Times quoted with approval the editorial comment of a Western newspaper publisher who wrote:
"Once more a Protestants is just as good as a Catholic, and a native-born citizen as a foreigner. Not having any imported blood in our veins, we have not felt upon an equality with mankind for a few months past. Now, till the commencement of another Presidential campaign, ‘all men are free and equal’."
The decade of the 1850’s was a period of significant change in American political parties. It witnessed the death of the Whigs, the Know-Nothing interlude, a division in the old Democratic party, and the rise to success of the Republicans. In a decade of such sweeping party realignment, thousands of voters, including the more important immigrant groups, exchanged their old allegiances for new political affiliations. In some states, particularly in the election of 1860, this realignment of foreign-born voters may have been decisive, as will be shown in a later chapter. The Irish alone remained faithful to the Democratic Party. There were some Irish Republicans by 1860, to be sure, but not many. In that year, the bulk of the Irish vote was cast for Stephen A. Douglas, and Irish-Americans remained true to their Democratic leaders.
The Irishman’s hatred for the Negro was undoubtedly a decisive factor in any explanation of the reasons for Irish opposition to the newly formed Republican Party. As early as 1850, an editorial in the New York Tribune commented on the strange phenomenon of the Irish, "themselves just escaped from a galling, degrading bondage," voting down every proposal to give equal rights to the colored race, and coming to the polls shouting, "Down with the Nagurs! Let them go back to Africa, where they belong!" The Irishman opposed the emancipation of the Negro in large part because he feared his competition in the labor market. During the Civil War, Irish longshoremen of New York bitterly resented the invasion of Negroes in the field of pick-and-shovel work, in which the Irish had long had a monopoly. There were frequent riots when Negro workers were used in the larger sea and lake ports to break strikes of longshoremen during the Civil War. These events go far to explain the fundamental reaction of Irish immigrants during the 1850’s to abolitionism and Free-Soilism of any kind.
In addition, influential Irish leaders, especially among the clergy, associated the abolitionist agitation with radicalism in general--- a radicalism which, in the United States, as in Europe, might ultimately be directed against the Roman Catholic Church. They argued, therefore, for strict obedience to the law and faithful observance of all parts of the United States Constitution, including its guarantee of slavery. The Boston Pilot favored strict enforcement of the fugitive slave law of 1850, declaring, "Abolitionism is no longer Christian. Its prime leaders are prime infidels. They think they can do in a day, what it took the Church centuries to accomplish." As late as the fall of 1861, Archbishop Hughes of New York urged support of a war for the Union, but added, "We despise, in the name of all Catholics, the ‘Idea’ of making this war subservient to the philanthropic nonsense of abolitionism." Brownson, the noted convert to Catholicism, wrote the cant of religion and morality on their lips, its leaders are.....infidels, blasphemers, as well as traitors and disorganizers." Little wonder that Theodore Parker replied, "Not an Irish newspaper is on the side of humanity, freedom, education, progress." Moreover, to many Irishmen, the triumph of abolitionist Republicans seemed to imply a revival of Puritanism, foreign to the Irish background and temperament. In Massachusetts, Republicanism was essentially Know-Nothing in character. Massachusetts Republicans believed they saw a connection between "Roman hierarchy and Southern oligarchy, whereby "the foreign vote constitutes the cornerstone of American slavery."
The Irish, in 1860, were as dubious about Lincoln’s qualities for leadership, as millions of other Americans. "Very good men have made their marks," commented The Pilot, "Lincoln has made his---with an axe." The same paper, however, praised Lincoln’s first inaugural address for its candor, though "no brilliant model in composition," and urged every citizen to support the President. By August, 1861, the editor deplored that Irishmen were being neglected by the Lincoln administration with regard to appointments and promotions in the Army and civil service, and, in 1862, he advised the election of a Democratic Congress.
The Irishmen of the Northern states, for the most part, shifted to a pro-war position after the firing on Fort Sumter. They had not voted for Lincoln, but they were ready to support the Constitution. Irish bishops and Irish editors called on their followers to respond as patriots to the call to preserve the Union, in spite of the nefarious allegiance of Know-Nothings and abolitionist Republicans, "the flag of our Union is not to be abandoned." When the emancipation proclamation was announced, many Irish opposed it. Their criticism of the President became more outspoken. They could not believe that white and black could live together, equally free, and they rejected amalgamation as abominable and disgusting. In the fall of 1862, The Boston Pilot was urging an armistice, although its pages continued to point with pride to the heroic response of Irishmen to the call to arms. Apparently, the paper was too Republican to suit its Southern readers, and many subscriptions were lost below Mason and Dixon’s line. The New Orleans Catholic Standard, as might have been expected, was an out-and-out Confederate paper; while the South Carolina Charleston Catholic Miscellany and the Baltimore Catholic Mirror denounced "Irishmen who had not the pluck to raise a regiment some years ago, to save themselves from church burners and assassins North and West," and who "are now raising regiments to march on the South, where the foul spirit of Know-Nothingism received its quietus........."
The most widely publicized internal disturbance in the North during the Civil War was the rioting precipitated by the draft law in the summer of 1863. Draft riots occurred in Boston; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Troy, New York; Newport, Rhode Island; and Lancaster, Pennsylvania; as well as in Maine, Ohio, New Jersey, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. None, however, reached the proportions of those in New York City. For these latter outbreaks, the Irish were severely attacked throughout the country, and all rioters were promptly and unfairly classed as Irish. At least two of the Irish wards in New York City remained perfectly quiet, and their colored residents were not disturbed. In the first ward, Irish porters and laborers formed a guard to fight off the rioters.
The fact remains, however, that the Irish were the worst offenders in the riots that held New York in the grip of a terror so widespread that Federal troops had to be summoned into the city to restore order. The reputation of the entire Irish group was damaged by the incident throughout the nation. More than opposition to the draft was involved. There was a feeling held in some quarters, and not without justification, that draft officials had drawn especially heavily upon the Democratic wards in New York. Above all, the riot took the form of a huge anti-Negro demonstration, and politicians seized the opportunity to stir up their followers against going to war for "niggers," while the rich remained at home. Why, according to the New York Daily News, should a worker leave his family destitute while he goes out to war to free a Negro who will then compete with him for a job?
Apparently, in his efforts to quell the disturbance, the Governor of New York also appealed to Archbishop Hughes to use his influence to stop the rioting, pillaging, and bloodletting that was going on, it was alleged in the excited press, in the Negro districts of the city. At any rate, a bulletin was prominently displayed throughout the city containing an appeal by the Archbishop "to the Men of New York who are now called in many of the papers, Rioters." They were summoned to the Bishop’s residence to hear an address. The announcement carried the interesting advice not "to be disturbed by any exhibition of municipal or military presence." "You who are Catholics, or as many of you as are," the call continued, "have a right to visit your bishop without molestation." Needless to add, the bulletin of the Archbishop stirred up a veritable newspaper war in New York. But the crowd came and heard the Archbishop, who appeared in purple robes and with the insignia of office. According to one reporter, the crowd was "of one nationality." The Archbishop made no mention of the Negroes who had been the special victims of the disorder. His address, moreover, contained some curious passages, but, in the main, it was a plea to the faithful to return to their homes. Peace was restored. The Tribune described the crowd as decent and well-behaved workingmen, not "identified with the unreasoning and merciless rioters." Apparently, as Bryant wrote in The New York Evening Post, the shepherd had "summoned the wolves" and "the sheep attended also." The New York Herald blamed the "niggerhead and copperhead press" for starting the riot among the workingmen, who were then joined by ruffians, thieves, jailbirds, and "grog-shop rowdies." "Irish they all were," wrote N. C. Willis in his Home Journal, "every soul of them---but they were the dirty, half-drunken, brutal rowdies, who are the leprosy of that fair-skinned race......," and not the respectable Irishmen of New York.
Other clergymen in the city and elsewhere joined Archbishop Hughes in denouncing the rioting and in issuing a plea for peace. All the churches were filled on the Sunday following the incident. One Irishman wrote to The New York Times proposing that his countrymen raise $50,000 to rebuild the colored orphan asylum which had been destroyed. ("The net result of the "great draft riots" was three days’ disorder, possibly seventy-four deaths at most, and probably eighteen; the burning of a colored orphan asylum; an orgy of journalism; and a scramble for fictitious damages.......") The newspapers seemed to agree on the high praise due the New York police force for its method of handling the riot. Certainly many of those on the force were Irishmen. Nevertheless, the reputation of all Irish-Americans suffered for years as a result of the wide notoriety given to these riots.
The Union Army, during the Civil War, was "an amalgam of nations." Over 400,000 foreign-born helped to save the Union. Many fought in the ranks of the Confederacy. Within 20 yards of Castle Garden were two large recruiting tents; with banners, offering large bounties for recruits; and recruiting agents tried to persuade the newcomers in their own tongue to join the colors. Both Irishman and German, as William H. Russell put it, were "fighting con amore and pro dolore ($)." Marching songs from many nations and in many languages could be heard during the Civil War. The Irish did their full share in the war between the States, in spite of their devotion to the Democratic Party and their hatred of abolitionism. Many enlisted in the hope of striking in some way at England, and were grievously disappointed when none of the crises in Anglo-American affairs during the Civil War led to hostilities with the British. In Irish regiments, green flags were carried alongside the American colors.
There were many foreigners of Irish and German birth in the Confederate Army also. Irish companies, such as the "Emerald Guards," as well as German companies, came from Charleston and western Tennessee to fight under the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. The South maintained recruiting agents in Europe, and sent an agent to Ireland to counteract the recruiting efforts of the Union government among the Irish people. A correspondent for The London Times, describing his visits to Confederate camps between Vicksburg and Cairo in 1861, was surprised to find so many Irishmen, "sometimes entire companies." He attributed the phenomenon to the suspension of work on the levees and railroads of the Mississippi Valley, and to the necessity for Irishmen to find work so that they might eat. Some immigrants, both Irish and German, were forcibly enrolled upon landing in New Orleans, and were given the alternative to fight or starve. Germans and Irish were conscripted by the Confederacy. Consequently, some deserted. A thousand Irish Catholic soldiers, captured in battle, swore allegiance to the South, and were equipped to fight against their former comrades. When they were sent to stop a raid in Mississippi, they ran up the white flag and deserted in a body again to the boys in blue. Some accounts fix the number of Irish in the Confederate Army at 40,000. Generals "Pat" Cleburne and Joseph Finnegan were two Irish-born Confederates; and John H. Reagan, the able Postmaster General of the Confederacy, was born in Tennessee of Irish parents.
It was no uncommon thing to find men of a score of nations at one military post--- Americans (From the North and South), English, Irish, Scotch, Canadians( Both French and English), French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Swedes, Danish--- men of all complexions, save the irrepressible one, and of every shade of character.
The number of Irish in the Union Army has been estimated at 170,000. Newspapers issued after the firing on Fort Sumter contain numerous references to the forming of Irish companies, regiments, and brigades. From Massachusetts came two Irish regiments carrying the Irish flag, the 28th and the 9th Massachusetts Volunteers; the latter commanded by Colonel Thomas Cass. The Emmett Guards of Worcester, Massachusetts, were in New York by the end of April, 1861. Irish contingents were raised in Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois; especially Chicago. The 15th Michigan Infantry was known as the "Mulligan Regiment" and had a Catholic chaplain. The "Irish Western Rifles" came from New York State, and three Irish companies recruited in Rochester were attached to the 105th New York Regiment. The 75th of New York was called the "Irish Rifles". The 69th New York regiment was commanded by Michael Corcoran. To the call for 1,000 men, 7,000 responded. The 20th New York, known as the "Ulster Guards" came from the coal and iron regions of Ulster County. Four Irish regiments were recruited in New York in May, 1861, to be known as Colonel Meagher’s Irish Zouaves; Colonel Barry’s regiment; the Saint Patrick’s Brigade, and the Irish Volunteers. "Rally ‘round the green flag" was a call that brought thousands into regiments in which the flag of Erin was conspicuously displayed as were the Stars and Stripes. The Irish regiment from Iowa was under the command of Colonel G. M. O'Brien; the Irish legion from Illinois was commanded by Colonel Timothy O’Meara. Companies or regiments of Irish came also from Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. The New York Times praised the loyalty of the Irish element in its editorial columns. The New York Herald advocated a revival of Irish immigration. The Boston Pilot ran serial articles expounding the record of Irish-American patriotism; and Horace Greeley’s Tribune rejoiced that "The Irish spirit of the North is thoroughly aroused." Here was the Irish answer to the nativists of the 1850’s! The military record of the Irish-Americans, like that of other foreign-born groups, effectively silenced Know-Nothingism for several decades.
The record of Irish regiments on the battlefield is a record not essentially different from other groups who rallied to the defense of the Union. At the outset of the war, there were some disciplinary problems among Irish volunteers. For a time, these threatened seriously to disturb the newly won harmony among the many American groups. The New York Times and the Brooklyn Eagle accused the Fire Zouaves of New York of cowardice at the first Battle of Bull Run--- and engagement in which very few seem to have distinguished themselves for bravery in the face of the enemy. The Zouaves had marched to the front 850 strong; attired in fez caps, red fireman’s shirts, and blue pants. They left 200 dead, wounded, and prisoners on the battlefield of Bull Run, and received a rousing welcome from the firemen on their return to New York City.
Unfortunately, they refused to submit to discipline in their quarters at the Battery; and, at night, almost to a man, they climbed the gates, evaded the sentries, and disappeared into the city. They testified that, "while they are ready at any moment to return to active service, they cannot brook confinement in any quarters near the city, which has been so long the scene of their labors in the Fire Department. Some of the Fire Zouaves got drunk in the city; and, in the end, 75 had to be dismissed from the service. There were Irishmen at Bull Run who fought with courage; there were others who moved to the rear as soon as they heard the boom of the enemy’s cannon. In this respect, their record is identical with that of others who participated in this first great debacle of the Civil War. On other occasions, Irish soldiers became unruly when furloughs were denied them; but, here again, the record of other groups in the Union Army is not essentially different. General T. F. Meagher distinguished himself by unusual valor at Fredericksburg, and Colonel Mulligan’s men, besieged by a greatly superior force at Lexington, fought for two and a half days without water. Regiments like the 69th New York won their laurels in several major campaigns, where the green flag waved in glory beside the Stars and Stripes. Finally, it should be pointed out that Catholic Sisters of Charity were assigned to military hospitals. Sister Anthony, of the Cincinnati Sisters of Charity, was gratefully remembered by many a stricken soldier, whether Catholic or Protestant, as "The Angel of the Battlefield."
The Civil War left Anglo-American relations in a state of severe strain, because of incidents which had arisen during the war, involving British neutrality, and because of irritating events along the Canadian border. To Irishmen living in America, this war was not a matter for regret. Indeed, many Irish-Americans had enlisted for the war at the instigation of leaders who wished them to get military training, and with the vague hope that, somehow or other, they might find an opportunity to turn their guns against England, their traditional enemy. The war was followed by the Fenian invasion of Canada; one of the most amazing examples of group activity by an immigrant element in all the annals of American history. The incident had international complications; it was used by Secretary of State Seward to bring pressure to bear on England to settle post-Civil War issues, and it was handled with unusual caution by American politicians, who did not wish to antagonize the large bloc of Irish voters at a time when American party lines were being redrawn after the war.
Not all Irish leaders were agreed on how Irish-Americans could best serve their beloved fatherland; but none ever forgot the sorrows of the Emerald Isle. Patrick Ford of The Irish World, for example, favored revolution and separation from England; whereas John Boyle O’Reilly, editor of The Boston Pilot, favored home rule for Ireland, to be won by constitutional methods. Some advocated support of the Fenian Brotherhood and its extreme program; others, like McGee, denounced the Fenians and their theories of divided allegiance as a "racket" to rob poor Irish workers and servant girls of their hard-earned wages. The Fenian organization itself was divided in leadership and program. Some Church leaders favored the movement; others opposed it as vigorously.
Nevertheless, thousands of Irish-Americans in the United States organized as a Fenian Brotherhood, with "circles" in the Army and Navy, as well as among the civilian population, and resolved at the close of the war to take advantage of strained relations between the United States and England, in order to launch a movement which would bring freedom to Ireland.
"...The lonely and lovely bride, whom (the English) have wedded, but have never won."
The plan eventually adopted was to do something for Ireland by twisting the tail of the British lion in Canada. Irish veterans of the Civil War were eager to put their military training to further use. A convention of Fenians at Cincinnati created, on paper, an Irish Republic, with a full complement of officials, and began to sell bonds, and prepare for a Canadian invasion. It was confidently expected that the Canadians would join the movement, and that the United States government would quickly recognize the new republican government to be set up in Canada.
On June 1, 1866, the hosts of Fenianism crossed the Niagara border, 1500 strong, seized Fort Erie, and threw up entrenchments. The American authorities proved extremely lax in preventing the mobilization of Fenians along the border, and the American Secretary of State, probably with an eye on the Irish voters, waited five days before issuing a neutrality proclamation. Several minor engagements were fought, and then the foolhardy venture collapsed. Hundreds of Fenians were arrested on their return to the United States, but were eventually paroled and returned to their homes at the expense of the United States government. A similar raid across the Vermont border also ended in failure, and Colonel W. R. Roberts, president of the "Irish Republic," was eventually arrested. Another attempted invasion, in 1870, was thwarted by the cooperation of United States and Canadian authorities. The incident became an issue in American politics in the uncertain party situation following the war, and many Americans asked themselves with McGee, what the eventual results might be of having an "alien population, camped but not settled in America, with foreign hopes and aspirations by the people among whom they live?"
Until after the World War, the Irish question remained an issue in American politics, to be revived for political purposes on almost every occasion when Irish votes were needed. The hatred of England was almost universal among Irish-Americans, and one suspects that the feelings of Irishmen were often stirred to fever heat for the politician’s ulterior purposes. Irish repeal meetings have been addressed by leading politicians since the 1840’s. New York mayors have continued to review St. Patrick’s Day parades to the present time; although they are not always decked out in a green suit, green tie, and green kid gloves, as on the occasion in 1870, when Mayor Hall reviewed the hosts of Irishmen marshaled by Tammany Hall under bosses Kelly, Croker, and Murphy. Politicians still contribute to Irish causes; as when Greeley, in 1872, reminded the voters of his $1,500 gift for Irish relief during the potato famine; and they are still subject to criticism if they are too respectful to England; as on the occasion when Mayor Hewitt seemed to glorify Queen Victoria on her Golden Jubilee, in 1877; or when President Arthur, three years earlier, happened to choose the Queen’s Birthday to dedicate the Brooklyn Bridge. And to this day, political oratory always reaches unusual heights of eloquence at St. Patrick’s Day celebrations.
Space does not permit a discussion of the many campaigns in which the Irish vote seemed to be especially significant. Several --- like the campaigns of 1868 and 1872; and the battle between Blaine and Cleveland for the presidency in 1884 --- must suffice as further illustrations.
From the political turmoil that followed Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson’s accession to the presidency, and his subsequent controversies with the radical Republicans over reconstruction, arose a necessity to rebuild party lines. No group of voters was too insignificant to woo at the ballot box. The issues raised by Fenianism and the raids on Canada provided a ready-made occasion to fish for Irish votes. President Johnson had maintained strict neutrality, for which his radical opponents, eager to catch Irish votes, lost no time in condemning him. The eccentric George Francis Train, campaigning for Johnson during the Congressional elections of 1866, denounced the radical Republicans, who now courted the Irish-American "Finnegan vote," as erstwhile Know-Nothings and convent burners. Johnson’s speech in defense of Catholics Train concluded "should be in every Catholic home. Johnson is an older Fenian than the eldest of you."
All this was but preliminary skirmishing for the Presidential campaign of 1868. Now the Democrats accused Schuyler Colfax, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, of being deliberately anti-Catholic. The Chicago Republican promptly denied the charge, insisting that the party organization could not be held responsible "for sermons which divines may preach from the pulpit." A special campaign sheet was published for the Irish by the Republican party organization, and prominent Irish leaders were induced to "rally ‘round the flag." The Irish People, a Democratic paper edited by D. O’Sullivan, received a check for $1,000 from prominent Republicans, and promptly changed its politics. In exasperation over these tactics of the campaign, The Chicago Post for September 9, 1868, paid its respects to these adopted citizens in language seldom exceeded in violence at electiontime. The editor exploded:
"Teddy O’Flaherty votes. He has not been in the country six months..... He has hair on his teeth. He never knew an hour in civilized society.........He is a born savage, as brutal a ruffian as an untamed Indian......Breaking heads for opinion’s sake is his practice. The born criminal and pauper of the civilized world........a wronged, abused, and pitiful spectacle of a man............pushed straight to hell by that abomination against common sense called the Catholic religion...........To compare him with an intelligent freedman would be an insult to the latter.........The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses..........Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic."
In 1872, Horace Greeley, as candidate of both the Democrats and the Liberal Republicans, had difficulty in holding the Irish vote, in spite of his excellent record as an opponent of Know-Nothingism, and his contribution of $1,500 in 1849 to the suffering Irish. Needless to add, this act of philanthropy was given wide publicity during the campaign. The fact that Horace Greeley was a teetotaler and had been associated with some curious reform movements during his career, did not help his chances among the Irish, however. Grant was extremely popular; and his popularity was sufficient to carry along his Vice-Presidential running mate, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, whose record as a Know-Nothing was well known, and who was described by The Tribune as "one of the most rampant and bigoted of the political proscribers of the German and Irish-Americans." Grant’s military record proved a tremendous asset with his Irish comrades in arms. Meetings were held in New York, St. Louis, and elsewhere by "Irish-American Republican Clubs" to remind the voters that Grant had succeeded in his diplomacy with England; that, by bringing about the abolition of slavery, he had "elevated the foreign laborer to a position heretofore denied him by Southern Democrats"; and that he had done more for Irishmen "than any of the party demagogues who had boasted that they always held Irish votes in their pockets."
In the Blaine-Cleveland campaign of 1884, both parties bid for the half-million Irish votes. The campaign was distinguished by its mudslinging features, by the closeness of the result, and by the effort of the Republicans to wean the Irish from their traditional Democratic allegiance --- a process which was successful at least to the extent that, for the next decade, there was a considerable group of so-called Blaine Irish Republicans that the party recognized in distributing spoils of office. The friends of Blaine made a studied effort in 1884 to win Irish votes. Blaine’s mother was a Catholic, and so were some of his relatives. His sister, it was reported, was a mother superior in a convent, though the reference was probably to a cousin, Sister Angela. Moreover, Blaine’s "spirited foreign policy" had been directed against the British, whereas the free trade policy of the Democrats was denounced as a pro-British device.
The Irish World, and The Irish Nation gave Blaine their support, and their editors, John Devoy and Patrick Ford, were enthusiastic Blaine men. Irish-American organizations appeared in Republican parades. The Republicans emphasized Blaine’s "Donegal and Londonderry blood," and the Democrats countered by pointing out that Cleveland had a maternal Irish ancestry also. A great Irish-American rally for Blaine was held in Chickering Hall, in New York; and in Boston, a convention of the Irish Land League announced that, if Blaine were elected, "Ireland would be free in thirty days." The Democrats tried to frighten the Irish by quoting articles Blaine had written 30 years earlier in The Kennebec Journal to prove that he was a prohibitionist. A special pamphlet issued by the Democratic party represented Blaine as a Know-Nothing and as a persecutor of Catholics and the foreign-born. When the famous slip about "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" occurred at a Blaine rally, at the close of the campaign, handbills by the thousands were left the next day at the doors of Roman Catholics quoting the remark as a deliberate insult to Irishmen. The incident may have been decisive in turning the election in New York, on which the national outcome depended.
When Cleveland ran again in 1888, he was described as "the British candidate," because of his advocacy of tariff reform; and both Cleveland and Harrison were quoted as having insulted the Irish group. In the incident of the Murchinson letter, when the British Ambassador advised voting for Cleveland, the Republicans had a rallying cry against Cleveland of special force among the Irish. Lord Sackville-West was promptly labeled the "British Election Agent," and the battle cry became, "No English Free Trade!" In 1888, Blaine addressed a great rally in Madison Square Garden. Over the platform hung an Irish flag inscribed, "Home Rule for Ireland." The decorations were of emerald green, and the keynote of the meeting was, "Every Irishman who votes for free trade is a practical ally of England."
The anti-British motif in Irish-American politics reappeared in numerous campaigns until after the close of the World War. During the Venezuela boundary controversy of 1895, and the Boer War, some Irish-American leaders welcomed the opportunity to revive anti-British propaganda. In the election of 1916, many Irish voters opposed President Wilson on the ground that, during the World War, he had been too lenient with England, their traditional enemy; and too severe with Germany, their friend. The chief spokesman for Irish self-determination at the Peace Conference of Versailles in 1919 were two Irish-American leaders whose relations with President Wilson proved to be anything but harmonious. In 1920, both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives adopted resolutions on the Irish question, virtually suggesting to the British Prime Minister how the issue should be settled.
The Americanization of the Irish proceeded so rapidly, in spite of the alarmists of the 1850’s and 1860’s, that no detailed discussion of this process in necessary here. The Irish have become so much a part of present-day Americanism that it seems curious indeed to review the characteristics they brought with them two generations ago, and to describe the reception they received from their American contemporaries. The Irishman is now so thoroughly Americanized that he is not averse to joining in denunciations of later immigrants whose ideas he considers dangerous to American institutions, apparently completely forgetful of the treatment his ancestors received 75 or 100 years ago. Indeed, a few Irish politicians have joined in the hue and cry to deprive other groups of their civil rights.
The Americanization process was already under way at the very time when the Irish element seemed most alarming to the nativists. Irish conventions in the 1850’s to provide emigrant aid, or to advocate the repeal of the union with England, revealed an interest in things other than saloons and city politics. A crop of Irish journalists published in the United States before the Civil War, showed a healthy interest in public, church, and Irish affairs. Financial contributions to the Irish cause, and for the relief of relatives and friends in Ireland, ran into the millions, proving, not only an abiding interest in filial and patriotic obligations, but a measure of prosperity for immigrants whose main income came from pick-and-shovel work and domestic service. In the 1850’s, the Irish sent at least $1,000,000 a year, and many prepaid tickets to their friends and relatives in Ireland. In less than 20 years, Alexander T. Stewart, "the lucky Irishman," became the owner of the finest store in the world, and one of the largest real-estate owners in New York.
Charitable institutions were established in several cities in the 1850’s, and clubs were organized for literary and social activities. In 1855, the Young Catholic Friends’ Society of Boston began its twentieth series of lectures. There was an Emmett Monument Association in Boston, which sponsored lectures on Irish freedom in the 1850’s; and, in 1855, the four Irish societies of Salem held a levee for charity, with Gilmore’s band as the main attraction. Irish reading rooms, Erina assemblies, and Tom Moore Clubs were established in several cities. In 1860, New York had an Ossianic Society, which published Gaelic manuscripts and documents dealing with Irish history. The American Irish Historical Society was founded in Boston in 1897.
The transformation of the Irishman in America was rapid and attracted the attention of many commentators. Perhaps the evidence of English travelers may be used as the most reliable, for certainly few of them began with any bias in favor of Irish-Americans. William Chambers, in his Things as They Are in America, admitted that Irishmen in the United States "soon acquire the sentiment of self-respect common to the American character." He found the transformation remarkably rapid, and testified to the ability of Irish workers to save money, and to become "more Americanized than the Americans." The same observer wrote:
"In the second generation.......the Irishman has disappeared. Associating in and out of school with the shrewd native youth, laughed, if not instructed, out of prejudices, the children of Irish descent have generally lost the distinctive marks of their origin........It is wonderful to notice how soon an Irishman in a long-tailed coat and patched knee-corduroys, is transferred into a hotel garcon, dressed neatly in a white jacket and pants; combed; brushed; and rendered as amenable to discipline as if under the orders of a drill-sergeant. Thus smartened up, the Irish have become a most important people in the United States. Irish girls......are here received with a sigh of delight; and what American housewives and hotelkeepers would now do without them, is painful to reflect upon........."
Another English observer, who spent three years among the working class in the United States during the Civil War, was even more complimentary, and his comments deserve extended quotation. In 1865, he wrote of the Irishman in the United States in the following words:
"Instead of the indolent deportment, careless manner, and slouching gait, which characterized him at home, the young Hibernian receives the genteel inspiration of fashion, and speedily has himself tailored into external respectability; he learns to walk with his head erect, and assumes an air in keeping with his altered condition. That crouching servility and fawning sycophancy to people above his grade, which made him a slave in all but the fetters, is cast aside; and he dons the character of a free citizen of the United States."
The writer was especially impressed with the Irish-American’s shrewdness, common sense, and fund of ready wit; and with the records of the money-order offices, which constituted "a lasting memorial of the industry, prudence, filial duty, and affection of thousands of the sons and daughters of the Green Isle........." He concluded that the Irish "are often more American than the natives, who trace their genealogies back to the pioneers."
By the time of the Civil War, Irishmen themselves were sensitive about their complete acceptance as genuine Americans. They especially resented the Irish plays that were so much in vogue on the American stage during this period. They criticized these plays as un-Irish in tone and sentiment; and they denounced the stage Irishman, who was invariably dressed in old-fashioned, battered garments, with a pipe in his hatband, and a shillelagh in his hand, from whose lips issued language that was both inelegant and blasphemous.
The Irishman has long since given up his monopoly of the pick and the shovel. Today French-Canadians, Italians, Poles, and others of the newer immigration do the heavy construction work which was once the special province of the Irish immigrant laborer. The Irishman has moved up in the scale, both economically and socially; to become a factory worker, a boss, or an employer; and thousands have successfully invaded the professions. Paddy has taken up clerking, bookkeeping, and business; or has become a traveling salesman. In law, politics, and the Church, he has been especially successful, perhaps because these professions require that warm human touch; mixed with a certain dash and quickwittedness so characteristic of many Irishmen. In the Church, the Irish have had almost a monopoly of the positions in the Catholic hierarchy in America, although their domination in this field is now being challenged by representatives of other groups. American journalism has enlisted many distinguished men and women of Irish blood, and the field of politics remains peculiarly the Irishman’s own. Bridget, once the answer to an American housewife’s prayer for adequate domestic help, has hung up her kitchen apron, except perhaps in some parts of New England, to become a seamstress, a factory worker, a saleslady, a stenographer, or a schoolteacher. She dresses well and is often more American than her American co-workers, though some of the rosy complexion of her ancestors may have been lost in the process of adjustment to her new environment.
The Irish, for the most part, retain that devotion to family which has always marked this warm-blooded and warm-hearted people. They are convivial and generous, sometimes to a fault; frequently improvident, and do not often come in conflict with the law except for intemperance, minor offenses, and occasional difficulties arising from the political graft of some of our larger cities. They know how to handle men, which accounts for much of their success in business, the Church, labor unions, and politics, where so much depends on friendship, human sympathy, and understanding. The Irishman’s extravagance of speech has affected the American language, and a number of Irish words and phrases have been absorbed into our daily speech. The Irishman’s contributions to drama, music, and the productive arts will be considered in a later chapter. What the Irishman has done for American literature, the vaudeville stage, and the wit and humor of the parlor and smoking room, must remain largely undescribed; for these things belong to the intangibles that color a civilization, but refuse to submit to statistical proof and appraisal.
There are Irish who have remained in the slums, while others have risen to places of distinction and influence in many walks of life. Perhaps the great majority, as has been said, have attained "that state of respectable mediocrity which is the foundation of American society." But in whatever station he may now find himself, the Irishman has helped to modify the Puritan heritage of America. He has tempered its somber colors and more gloomy outlook with the joys of life. In spite of his mercurial temperament, it may still be said of the Irishman, as it was when Irishmen first began coming to America in large numbers:
"How gallantly, indeed, do Irish wit and cheerfulness, and hospitability, and patriotism, ride on the wreck of individual hopes; and sparkle through the very waves of adversity!"