CRE 151: When America Despised the Irish: 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis
CRE 151: When America Despised the Irish: 19th Century’s Refugee Crisis
I) Irish -forced from homeland due to famine, political upheaval they faced massive discrimination before becoming mainstream in America
1. Considered to be poor/disease-ridden
2. Threatened to take jobs away from Americans
a. A strain on welfare budgets
b. Practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to foreign leader
c. They would bring crime, and were accused of being rapists
II) A Famine Forces Unprecedented Migration
a. Nearly 2 million refugees from Ireland crossed Atlantic
i. Beginning in 1845 the potato virulent pathogen destroyed Ireland’s staple crop and made it unedible
ii. While the blight hit much of Europe Ireland dependency on potatoes made it worse
iii. Potatoes easy to grow, nutrition, flourished on small parcels of land
b. Irish consumed 7 million tons each year
i. Ate potatoes for dinner, lunch and breakfast
ii. Average adult working Irish male consumed 14 pounds of potatoes each dy
iii. Average adult Irish woman ate about 11.2 pounds.
c. Seven years the famine ravaged the countryside
d. Barefoot mothers, clothes dripping from bodies clutching dead infants in their arms begged for food
e. Wild dogs fed on human corpses
f. Some people even ate turfs of grass, while Desperate farmers sprinkled holy water on crops
g. Typus, dysentery, tuberculosis and cholera ravaged the countryside as a constant stream of carts carrying bodies to mass graves.
III) British Neglect Exacerbates the Irish plight
a. Irish lived in a political system ruled by London and an economic system dominated by British absentee landlords only aggravated the problem
b. Centuries of British laws deprived Ireland Catholics of their rights to worship, vote, speak their language or own land, horses and guns.
c. s the famine raged Irish were even denied food
i. armed guards continued to escort convoys laden with wheat, oats, and barley to England while Ireland starved
IV) British lawmakers adherents to laissez-fair capitalism
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a. Determined to allow the natural course of free markets solve humanitarian crisis
b. Gret Britain cannot continue to throw her hard-won millions into the bottomless pit of Celtic pauperism appeared in Illustrated London News in March of 1849
i. sneered Charles E. Trevelon, British civil servant charged with providing relief to the Irish (Hibernian overpopulation)viewd the famine as divine judgement intended to “teach the Irish a lesson.
c. Irish population lost nearly half by time potato blight abated in 1852
d. 1 million perished
e. 2 million abandoned the land
f. Most of exiles (nearly a quarter of Irish nation) came to U.S.
g. They were drawn by one fact It was better than the hell that they experienced in Ireland.
V) A Mass Exodus begins in 1847
a. 5,000 boats transported migrants from Ireland
b. They were hungry, sick and many had spent their last pennies for transport
c. Treated much like freight for the 3,000 mile journey that lasted four weeks
d. Some of these had been used to transport slaves from Africa
e. Nearly a quarter of the 85,000 passengers died in transit
f. Therefore ships named coffin ships
g. Bodies wrapped in cloths, weighed down with stones and tossed overboard.
VI) The irish did not arrive yearning to breath free
VII) They were hunger and wanted to work
VIII) While some paid for their voyage, British landlords paid for others as this was a cheaper solution then to pay for charity at home
IX) The Scotch-Irish who immigrated to America fought in the Continental Army and tamed the frontier
X) Not only poor, but unskilled refugees huddled in rickety tenenements
III) The influx heightens religious tensions.
i) Conflict between Protestants and Catholics
a. In New York, Bible Riots of 1844 Anti-Catholic, anti-Irish mobs in Philadelphia destroyed houses and torched churches
i. Archbishop John Hughes built a wall around Old St. Patricks Cathedral to protgect it from nativeborn population
ii. Stationed musket-wielding members of Ancient Order of Hibernians to guard city’s churches
ii) Wild conspiracy theories took root that women were being held against their will in Catholic convents and that priests were systematically raping nuns and strangling any children born of this union.
iii) While an equal number of Germans immigrants entered in 1850, it was the Irish that were vilified by country’s Anglo-Saxcon Protestants
a. They held grudges against the Catholic church that targeted them in Europe
b. They burned Papal effigies in the city’s streets during annual guy Fawkes Day celebrations.
c. While some protestants created Christian charities for the refugees
i. Such as Captain Robert Bennet Forbes -a Boston Brahman spearheaded Americ’s first major foreign disaster releivef effort by delivering food and supplies to Ireland aborad a government warship during Black 47
d. But here many believed that the Irish were being encouraged to migrate to America as a P{apal plot to overthrow the government and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati
i. The Irish would impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land
e. But the States and cities controlled immigration at this time
i. They poored into these areas
ii. Boston, for example with little more than 100,000 people, saw 37,000 Irish arrive in just a few years
iii. The Irish in Boston were “fated to remain a massive lump in the community, undigested and undigestible -they were considered unassimilatable according to Oscar Handlin -author of Boston’s Immigrants -1780-1880
f. Irish filled most menial and dnageroud jobs at the lowest salary
g. They cut canals, dug trenches for water and sewer pipes
h. Laid rail lines and cleaned houses, they were stevedores, stable workers and blacksmiths
i. this enraged many of the working-class Americans seing the cheaper laborers taking their jobs
j. some Irish sided with the Mexicans in the Mexican-Ameriocan War
i. drawn in part by higher wages and common cause with the Mexicans who were members of St. Patrick’s Batalian which had deserted from the U.S. Armyafter an encounter with a bigoted commanders
1. 50 of their members were executed by the U.S. army for treason after their capture.
IV) A Nativists Backlash
1) Discrimination faced by famine refuges not subtle or insidious
a. Was being lauded in the newspapers classified advertisements No Irish Need Apply
2) In 1849 -a fraternal society of native-born Protestant men called the Order of the Star Spanked Banner formed in New York
a. Sacred oaths and secret passwords
b. Members wanted to return to the America they once knew -a land of Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism
3) Also the black Snakies, and rough and Redies also came into being across nation with same mission.
4) In a few years these became the antiCatholic, anti-immigrant American Party -Knownd as the Know-Nothings because they claimed to know nothing when questioned about their politics
a. They were elected because they were native-born citizens, they were not Roman catholics and they believed that Protestantism defined American society.
b. They believed that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values.
c. Their war cry _Americans must rule America
i. Elected eight governors, more than 100 congressmen and mayors of cities including Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago in mid-1850s.
ii. In Massachusetts in 1844 they captured all state offices, the entire State Senate, and all but a handful of seats in the House chamber
iii. Once in power they made it mandatory to read the King James Bible in public schools
iv. Disbanded Irish militia unites, confiscated their weapons and deported nearly 300 poor Irish back to Lvierpool because they were a drain on the public treasury
v. They barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had lived 21 years in the U.S.
d. Millard Fillmore, the former president most notable for being un-notable, ran on the American Party’s (Know nothing) 1856 presidential ticket
i. As the 13 president he had consistently courted the votes of nativits Yankees fearful of changes brought by the foreignb Catholics
1. He blamed them for his defeat in 1844 New York gubernatorial election
ii. He finished third behind Democrat James Buchanan and Republican John C. Fremont
1. Fremont had been accused of being both Catholic and cannibal
iii. Know-Nothing -American Party received more than 20% of popular vote and eight electoral votes.
5) Nativists use of violence to further an agenda
a. 1854 anti Catholic mob in Ellsworth Main dragged Jesuit priest John Bapst
i. He had circulated petition denouncing use of King James Bible in local schools
b. Bapst was drugged into the street, stripped, and his body was tared and feathered
6) Know-Nothings in Bath, Maine smashed the pews of church recently purchased by Irish Catholics before hoisting American flag from the belfry and setting the building on fire
7) When the Biship came to city a year later to lay cornerstone for church’s replacement another mob chased him away and beat him
8) Bloody Monday Violence turned deadly in Louisville, Kentucky in August 1855 when armed know-nothing mob guarding poling stations on election day launched street fights against German and Irish Catholics
a. Immigrant homes were ransacked and torched
b. Between 20-199 people, including a German priests were fatally attacked while attempting to visit a dying parishioner, were killed
9) Thousands of Catholics fled the city in the riots aftermath -but not one was prosecuted for crimes committed on Bloody Monday
10) Know Nothing mob seized marble block gifted by Pope Pius IV for construction of the Washington Monument and tossed it into the Potomac River
11) Baltmore’s John F. Weishampel suggested that the stone was to be used as a signal from the Pope to launch an immigrant uprising to take over America
12) Abraham Lincoln -among those disturbed by rise of nativists movement
a. in 1855 letter he stated: As a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal we now practically read all men except negros,
b. When the Know-Nothings get control it will read all men are created equal except negros, foreigners and Catholics.
c. When this occurs Lincoln stated he would go to a country where liberty is not pretended, where it is hypocrisy such as Russia.
13) Know-Nothing party died off -party splintered as the slavery question superseded the immigrant menance as the flashpoints such as the Kansas-Negraska Act, Dred Scott decision, and uprising at Harpers Ferry pushed the country toward the civil war.
VI) The Irish found their footing-at the ballow box
1) Although stereotyped as ignorant bogtrotters loyal only to the pope/illsuited for democracy, and only recently given political rights by British in their own home ..the irish were deeply engaged in political process in their new home
2) They voted in higher proportions than other ethnic groups
3) Their numbers propelled William R. Grace to become first Irish Catholic mayor of New York in 1880 and Hugh O’Brien first Irish catholic mayor of Boston four-year latter
4) one Generation after great hunger -Irish controlled powerful political machines across the United States
a. Began moving up the social ladder into middle class as a new group of immigrants from China and Southern and Eastern Europe began in the 1880s and 1890s
b. The Irish were now acceptable, had assimilated into American way of life
c. No longer at the lowest rung in American society
5) They gained acceptance into mainstream by dishing out same bigotry toward the newcomers that they had experienced.
a. Whatever happens the Chinese must go became the slogan for American laborers -leaders of Workingmen’s Party -Denis Kearny would end his speeches.
b. And so the Irish became American -they also became racist.
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