IN RECENT YEARS THE SPECTER of identity politics—of people identifying themselves and organizing themselves around their ethnicity or race, for example—has created enormous concerns in American society. Critics, from Michael Kazin and Todd Gitlin on the Left to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Lynne Cheney on the Right, have raised alarms across the political spectrum about the dangers of splintering American reform efforts or American society as a whole. In an age when accusations of reverse discrimination, ethnic and racial separatism, and even Balkanization and tribalism are ubiquitous, we would do well to remember that identity politics—that racial and ethnic identity—have always mattered in the United States.
The period between 1837 and 1877, during which economic and geographic growth thoroughly changed the face of the nation, offers an excellent window on how these aspects of identity defined a person’s place in or outside of American society. In these years immigrants began to flood into the United States in unprecedented numbers: the Irish, the Germans, and, on the West Coast, the Chinese foremost among them. American expansionism and industrialization affected each of these populations directly and often dramatically. These forces also touched other populations—Indians, Mexicans, and African Americans—already living in the United States, or in what became the United States, profoundly altering their relationship to American society.
In 1837, American expansionism had tremendous momentum. Texas had just declared its independence from Mexico and was pushing for entry into the United States. Georgians, working with Andrew Jackson’s full cooperation, were just completing their successful effort to expand their access to tillable soil by forcing the Five Civilized Tribes westward. The federal government sponsored expeditions into the West throughout this period, scouting out accessible transportation routes and valuable resources; in these years, overland trails were replaced by the transcontinental railroad. Through the Mexican American War, fought between 1846 and 1848, and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, the United States added California and parts of present-day Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico. In the course of these few years, the United States increased in size by more than 70 percent. By 1877, thirteen new states entered the Union, and the rest of what became the continental United States was organized into territories.
Industrialization and economic growth went hand in hand with territorial expansion. The new lands provided raw materials for burgeoning American industries and provided access to new markets for goods. Slave owners in the South migrated west as the nation expanded, leaving tired soil behind them. As cotton production shifted west, it increased its importance to the American textile industry and to the export economy of the country. The new lands spurred the transportation revolution, which produced a transcontinental railroad and the first American corporations by 1869. One clear marker of economic growth was the increase in American production. The goods produced in the United States increased several fold in these decades. The nation produced $483 million in manufactured goods in 1840. In 1870 the gross national product had grown to $7.4 billion, and by 1880 it had climbed to $11.2 billion.
All of this growth and development offered seemingly endless opportunities to people living within the nation’s borders. But these opportunities were starkly defined in racial terms. The notion of Manifest Destiny—that American expansion was inevitable because it was the will of God—had obvious racial implications. It indeed offered boundless possibility for those who laid claim to God’s blessings, but it had dire consequences for those who stood in the way. Likewise, industrial and geographic expansion opened up new jobs and new acres to farm by the tens of thousands. But as this essay will argue, access to jobs and farms were by and large determined racially as well. Simply stated, those defined as white could opt for inclusion and participation in American society—and access to economic opportunities—while those defined as nonwhite by and large could not. This was, however, no simple binary of exclusion and inclusion. The reconstitution of the American population during these decades provoked a reassertion—and in many ways a complex reworking—of racial identity and racial hierarchy in the United States.
The Irish were the first white population in the United States to face significant challenges to their racial identity, and to their presence in the country in general. Irish immigrants began to arrive in the United States in the 1820s, and by 1840 they constituted nearly half of all immigrants entering the country. Over the next forty years, more than 2.5 million more Irish immigrated into the United States. So many of them settled in urban areas in the Northeast that immigrant historian Marcus Hansen referred to them as the “second colonization of New England.” Though they arrived at an opportune moment in American economic history, they faced serious opposition to their presence in the United States. Not only their racial identity, but also the dire circumstances of their arrival and their Catholicism made them targets of people concerned about their potential impact on the country. These challenges, and their ability to overcome them, determined the extent of Irish access to American society.
Those who came in the 1840s left a country in dire straits. A blight struck potato crops, on which most Irish depended for survival, and between 1845 and 1849 the population of Ireland fell by more than a million. Many left the country, considering themselves involuntary exiles, and many more starved to death. But as Hasia Diner has argued, the famine did not so much create the enormous problems Ireland faced as exacerbate them. English colonialism had created the context for the deadly famine long before it struck, and the downward spiral in population continued well after the blight ended. From 1841 to 1891, Ireland lost almost 50 percent of its population. Marriage rates plummeted as economic conditions grew worse. Family ties nonetheless remained vital to many immigrants; one historian has argued that the Irish were the first to practice chain migration. As often as not, though, it was siblings who traveled together rather than husbands, wives, and children.
The Irish who made their way to the United States were predominantly impoverished and poorly educated, and thus often confined to manual labor. The Irish entered at the bottom of the social and economic scale and took jobs that few others would. Nonetheless, the labor that they provided was vital. Irish men began to arrive just as the United States turned seriously to developing its infrastructure. Irish labor helped build canals in the Northeast, the National Road, and eventually the transcontinental railroad. In general, they eschewed rural life, settling almost exclusively in urban areas. In many northeastern towns and cities, Irish men dominated day labor by the middle of the 1840s.
Unlike any other immigrant group, the majority of the Irish who came to the United States were women. They were not only forced from Ireland by conditions there, but also drawn to this country because of an economic niche open to them—domestic service. This job was always available to Irish immigrant women. By the 1850s they were 80 percent of the domestic servants in New York City. Even decades later their association with this work remained strong. Irish women moved fairly quickly into the textiles industry and into needlework as well. But as late as 1900 over 60 percent of all Irish-born women in the United States still worked as domestics.
Despite the hard labor that Irish immigrants provided, they were routinely maligned by native-born Americans and by those who had immigrated earlier. While there had been Catholics in the United States from its first days, the Irish Catholic population grew enormously in the mid-nineteenth century, reaching 2 million by 1842. This religious difference, and increasing Irish demands for the right to open their own schools, caused alarm among certain Americans. The Irish also gained a reputation for criminality, for pauperism, and for alcohol abuse that increased opposition to their presence.
Opposition to the Irish coalesced into a nativist movement as early as the 1830s. In 1837 New York City elected a nativist mayor and city council. Nativists, who drew on the secretive nature of their organization in calling themselves “Know-Nothings,” gained power through the 1840s. Though broadly antiforeign, they focused the majority of their attention on the Irish. By the 1850s, nativists had formed the American Party, which for a time vied with the new Republican Party to replace the defunct Whigs. In 1856, the American Party scored its greatest successes. It elected 7 governors, 8 United States senators, and a staggering 104 members of the United States House of Representatives. Though the North, consumed by the issue of slavery, soon turned to the Republicans, nativist impulses—and racialized threats to Irish presence—still ran deep and strong in American society. In facing challenges to their racial identity as white, the Irish presented one of the most complex reworkings of racial identity and hierarchy in this era. Irish immigrants were often associated—and often associated themselves—with African Americans. Free blacks and Irish often lived in the same neighborhoods and socialized together. They often competed for the same unskilled labor because these were the only jobs open to either; Irish women vied with black women (and with the few Chinese women in the West who had immigrated) for domestic service jobs. Slave owners even occasionally hired Irish day laborers to perform jobs deemed too dangerous for their slaves.
But historians of the construction of whiteness have recognized that as challenged as certain white European immigrant groups might have been, they nonetheless enjoyed access to rights that nonwhites did not. Thomas Guglielmo’s analysis of Italian immigrants applies equally to Irish immigrants. He argues that the “whiteness” of these populations was rarely called into serious question; rather the quality of their whiteness was. Thus, for example, unlike immigrants like the Chinese, who were defined as nonwhite, the Irish could naturalize as citizens under the 1790 Naturalization Act, which allowed only whites this access. As Matthew Jacobson has argued, they were “the first to immigrate in huge numbers at once well within the literal language but well outside the deliberate intent of the ‘free white persons’ clause of 1790.” The act’s authors may not have intended to include them, but these immigrants were included nonetheless.
Irish immigrants had other ways to separate themselves from their nonwhite counterparts, and they used them to full advantage. Their concentration in urban areas made them the target of scorn and even violence. (The Irish notoriously established the first American “ghettoes,” and anti-Catholic riots erupted in Philadelphia and in other cities in the 1840s.) But it also eventually helped them, especially because they arrived just at the outset of American urban development. This not only helped them dominate construction and domestic service jobs in their early years, it also made them critical components of the power base the Democratic Party was trying to build in northeastern cities. As David Roediger has argued, the Irish found in the Democratic Party not only a route to political power, but also a way to assert their whiteness. As the Democrats became outspokenly antiblack (and at times proslavery), Roediger asserts, in northeastern cities, “In areas with virtually no black voters, the Democrats created a ‘white vote.’” The Irish were also able to use their ties to political party machines to move into municipal jobs. Irish immigrants used their labor in other ways to gain access to American society. Many Irish women working as domestics had long thought of their jobs as inroads into the American middle class. If they could not join the middle class through their labors, they could at least observe it firsthand. Many Irish men and women also became prominent members of the labor movement that was growing rapidly, if unevenly, in the United States between the 1830s and the 1870s. According to Hasia Diner, “Irish women provided much of the female trade union leadership in the last half of the nineteenth century.” Irish men and women became instrumental members of many labor unions in these years, including the newly formed Knights of Labor. Their municipal jobs, their union membership, and the spiritual and institutional strength that the Catholic Church provided them elevated the status of the Irish in American society.
Many, though not all, also used their realization that, as Kerby Miller noted, blacks could be “despised with impunity” to their advantage. Irish attacks on blacks became so common in New York City that bricks were known as “Irish confetti.” In 1863 tension in that city over the draft turned violent as many Irish, who saw the war as a battle over slavery, took their frustration at conscription out on the black residents. But if some Irish used attacks on blacks in an attempt to cement their relationship to American society, others used more noble means. General Thomas Meagher’s Irish Brigade, for example, suffered losses of two-thirds of its men at Fredericksburg. All told, thousands of Irish Catholics fought for the Union during the Civil War.
Despite these numerous inroads into American society, the status of the Irish in the United States by 1877 in many ways remained insecure. Irish behavior during the 1863 draft riot had horrified many observers; some of them described the Irish, in terms usually reserved for Indian foes, as “savages,” “savage mobs,” and “demons.” At the same time as the riots were taking place, the enigmatic Molly Maguires launched a series of mortal attacks against employers and other officials they deemed unjust in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. As Kevin Kenny’s work makes clear, the Molly Maguires were hardly representative of all Irish immigrants. He notes that ethnic identity is “historical, contingent and contested rather than essential [and] fixed,” and many Irish immigrants worked arduously to counter the Molly Maguires’ version of Irish ethnic identity. Kenny argued that “in the anthracite region at least, a specific Catholic definition of Irishness emerged victorious in the 1870s.” It may have been victorious, but it was not the only one. In June 1877, ten Molly Maguires were hung in a single day, and once more, despite the enormous progress Irish immigrants had made, comparisons with “savage Indians” filled indignant editorials. The Irish by 1877 had taken full advantage of their whiteness; their status in the United States, however, was still being contested.
Germans were, with the Irish, the largest group of white ethnic immigrants to the United States in this period. Unlike the Irish, German immigrants were largely able to avoid vilification and faced far fewer impediments in their efforts to take advantage of American expansionism and industrialization. Highly skilled, well educated, predominantly Protestant, and largely rural (and thus more often able to avoid harmful attention), they were able to make the adjustment to life in the United States with little of the duress experienced by Irish immigrants, much less by those identified as nonwhite. Even the sizable German Jewish population (there were fifty thousand German Jews in New York City by 1860 and as many as ten thousand in smaller cities like Cincinnati in the same year) achieved considerable success in retail industries and in banking. It is little wonder that the metaphor of the United States as a “melting pot” was coined by German immigrant Christian Essellen in 1857, about fifty years before it gained currency in English.
Between 1840 and 1880, almost 3 million Germans arrived in this country; in these decades they were never less than one-fourth of incoming immigrants. Most historians agree that Germans came predominantly for economic reasons—not because of poverty or economic duress, but because changing economic conditions at home made the move across the ocean seem more advantageous. There were, however, some Germans who migrated for religious reasons. For example, some Lutherans made their way here because of the discrimination they faced in their homeland. Still others came for overtly political reasons, like the small but extremely vocal and articulate number of refugees from the failed revolution in 1848.
German immigrants stood out in this period as an unusually skilled and educated population. This was at least true of the men, who were quickly able to exploit their skills in the labor market. By 1850, for example, almost half of the German immigrants living in Chicago were employed as artisans or skilled workers; almost another 9 percent were small businessmen. German women by and large found work in the service sector, employed in jobs ranging from domestic servant to baker to hotelkeeper to nurse.
German immigrants also distinguished themselves from the Irish by settling predominantly away from northeastern urban areas. Taking full advantage of the United States’ push west, and of the benefits it held out to white settlers, a considerable number of these migrants took up farming to earn their livelihood. They settled so broadly in rural areas away from the Atlantic coast that what came to be known as a “German Belt” stretched across eighteen states from the Northeast to the Midwest. As late as 1870, one in four German immigrants was still involved in agricultural pursuits.
Though German immigrants did not endure anything approaching the challenges the Irish faced, German presence in the United States did not go uncontested. Some of their social habits—their unwillingness to give up drinking on Sundays, and certain Germans’ willingness to socialize with blacks—created consternation. Many working-class Germans engaged enthusiastically in union activity and in radical politics. They helped establish the Socialist Labor Party, the first socialist party in the United States, in 1877. By that time German anarchists were also organizing Lehr-und-Wehr-Vereins, “Instruction and Protection Societies,” which focused on education and military training. The first one, founded in Chicago in 1875, was soon one of the largest workers’ militias in the United States. These radical activities caused concern almost immediately. And while German Jews faced little overt discrimination in these decades, Carey McWilliams and John Higham have both argued that religiously and economically based anti-Semitism began to take hold in the United States by 1877.
German immigrants also faced occasional racial challenges. European racial theorist Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, in his 1855 The Inequality of Human Races, a book widely read by American scholars, condemned not only Italians and Irish, but also Germans as “the human flotsam of all ages.” Germans in the United States—and especially the Catholics among them—were included as well in the objections that nativists raised about immigration.
But these challenges did little to damage Germans’ sense of security in their adopted home. They were able to point to a number of lofty cultural achievements and to draw on an organizational life that one historian has described as unrivaled by other immigrant groups. The German press in the United States dated back to the colonial era; German theater productions and music recitals appeared regularly in midwestern and northeastern cities. German immigrants established fraternal organizations, mutual aid societies, and labor associations on neighborhood, urban, and regional levels.
They were able to make inroads into American society in other ways as well. Like Irish women, German women who worked as domestics could use their proximity to American middle-class women as models for their own patterns of behavior and consumption. Unlike the Irish, whose enthusiasm for the Union during the Civil War was hardly unanimous, Germans established a solid reputation for supporting the Union. German Free-Soilers and members of the German immigrant community in Chicago, for example, were staunch opponents of slavery by the outbreak of the war. During the war, ten German immigrant regiments were raised in New York City alone.
These immigrants withstood challenges to their presence in the United States because of their remarkable level of cultural and racial confidence. Applying many of the same racial theories used to malign other immigrants and races, they were able to argue the equality—at the very least—of Anglo-Saxons and Teutons. During the Mexican American war, when the notion of Manifest Destiny was evoked to justify the conquest of supposedly “inferior” races, one German immigrant was able to assert, “We too, even though we are not Anglo-Saxons, believe in ‘manifest destiny’ and—we add for the benefit of the nativists—‘manifest destiny’ also believes in us.” In a nation in the process of reformulating its notions of racial hierarchy, German immigrants boldly placed themselves at the top of that hierarchy.
Nevertheless, German immigrants would remain a challenged population in the United States. Their involvement in radical politics and unionizing would make them targets of a Red Scare in 1886. Their insistence on language maintenance—through building their own schools or pushing their local schools to teach German—would make them a highly visible target again in 1917. But before 1877 most problems they faced were internal to their community. There were so many divisions—geographic, religious, and ideological—that historian Kathleen Conzen has questioned whether German immigrants could even be called an ethnic group. Nonetheless, the skills and levels of education many Germans brought with them, their organizational prowess, and especially the confidence that their standing as “superior” whites gave them placed them in a position unrivaled by other immigrant groups in this or any era.
Chinese immigrants did not arrive in nearly the same numbers as German or Irish immigrants, but their concentration on the west coast—itself a product of and a spur to American expansionism and industrialization—and their identity as nonwhites meant that their presence in the United States would be both significant and severely embattled. The first Chinese began to arrive soon after gold was discovered in California in 1848; 325 Chinese were among the first fortune seekers. By 1852, Chinese immigrants numbered more than twenty thousand, most of them still in California. In ensuing decades the Chinese immigrant population continued to climb; the census showed sixty-three thousand Chinese in the United States in 1870, and more than 105,000 in 1880. Almost all of these immigrants were men; for reasons often rooted in cultural traditions, women tended not to travel abroad. They were also discouraged from immigrating by the 1875 Page Law, which in practice treated all Chinese women as potential prostitutes. As late as 1880, Chinese men in the United States still outnumbered women by more than twenty to one. They were drawn not only by the allure of potential riches, but because of the enormous turmoil in China. The first Opium War, fought between the English and the Chinese beginning in 1839, created great unrest and despair in China. Western intervention in the country and internal tensions produced a series of revolts. The Taiping Rebellion, for example, begun in 1850 by a man who claimed he was Jesus’ younger brother, would claim 10 million lives across south and central China.
The work that the Chinese did, and the ways in which their work experiences and opportunities evolved, were inseparable from their reception in the United States. For a time they were well received; the Governor of California in 1852 referred to them as “one of the most worthy classes of our newly adopted citizens.” In these early years, two-thirds of the Chinese immigrants worked in the gold mines, most of them panning for gold in small placer claims. By 1870 only about one in four were still mining, by then often as company employees, and spread across six states. Two things had happened that caused the numbers of Chinese immigrant miners to drop. First, the most easily accessible gold had been found; companies with capital to purchase extractive equipment now dominated the mines. But even before this development, white miners had pushed the California state legislature to remove the Chinese from the mines. The 1852 Foreign Miners tax targeted Chinese miners because they were ineligible for citizenship, requiring them to pay $3 a month until the law was overturned in 1870. In 1859, the state legislature passed another law expressly “to protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the State of California.” The law, which misidentified Chinese immigrants as coolies, imposed an additional monthly tax on them (with few exceptions) simply for living in the state.
Chinese immigrants soon found another source of employment helping to build the transcontinental railroad. Once again, racial identity was the definitive issue. The Central Pacific Railroad hired one hundred Chinese workers in 1865, and white workers quickly insisted that they be fired. Leland Stanford, the head of the railroad, weary of labor troubles with white workers, made the decision to hire Chinese workers exclusively for the remainder of the project. By 1869, when the railroad was completed, twelve thousand Chinese were working for the railroad—90 percent of its workforce. They were hired not only to send a warning to unruly white workers, but also because their employers regarded them as an easily exploitable workforce. During the infamous winter of 1866, railroad officials forced their Chinese employees to work despite sixty-foot snowdrifts. They worked in tunnels dug through the snow. A number of Chinese workers were buried when the tunnels gave way; some were not found until the spring thaw. When they struck the next summer, to protest their abusive treatment and the fact that they were paid far less than white workers, their employees cut off their food and starved them into submission.
After the railroad work was completed, Chinese immigrants went in two different directions for employment. Many turned to agriculture, finding jobs as farm laborers throughout California. By the end of the 1870s, they constituted most of the farm labor in four California counties and nearly half of the farm labor force in two others. Many more Chinese moved into urban areas, especially San Francisco. At first they were able to find employment in a variety of burgeoning enterprises—forming almost half of the work force in boot and shoe manufacture, woolen goods, cigars, and sewing. Before long, however, protests from whites drove them almost entirely into self-employment. By the 1860s and 1870s, Chinese restaurants and especially Chinese laundries were ubiquitous. Although self-employment offered certain benefits, external forces confined the Chinese to these economic niches. Their dominance of the laundry business, for example, was entirely a product of immigration. There was no tradition of male launderers in China; laundering was simply one of the only occupations open to them.
Chinese immigrants had faced enormous resistance, and even violence, in California from the first. In 1849, just after they arrived, sixty Chinese miners were chased off their jobs by angry white miners. As Sucheng Chan points out, in 1862 the California State legislature received a list of eighty-eight Chinese miners who had been killed by whites—including eleven killed by collectors of the Foreign Miners tax. Job competition was particularly fierce in San Francisco; by one estimate, in 1870 there were two white workers and one Chinese worker for every job in the city. Especially after the economic depression of 1873 began, anticoolie club members attacked Chinese in the streets, and several were suspected of starting suspicious fires at factories that still hired Chinese workers. In 1877, the local press reported the establishment of the Order of Caucasians, which dedicated itself to driving the Chinese out of the city entirely.
Chinese immigrants sustained themselves in the face of this opposition through a rich organizational life. They quickly formed huiguan, associations of immigrants from the same districts in China, which provided mutual aid and an arena for socializing. By 1862 the leaders of six large huiguan in California organized the Chinese Six Companies, which fought effectively for Chinese immigrants’ rights in the United States. Chinese immigrants often formed rotating credit associations, which enabled each member in turn to use the collective resources of the group to found a business or embark on some other economic enterprise. Less wealthy immigrants were often drawn to Tongs, secret societies with revolutionary roots in China, which functioned as “alternative, antiestablishment” institutions in the new land.
But this organizational life, and the contributions that their labor wrought in agriculture, mining, and railroad construction, were not enough to prevent attacks against the Chinese. Even those who recognized the rich and complex history of China dismissed these immigrants as the product of a decaying culture. Opposition to the Chinese had always been strong in California, among both political and working-class leaders. When they were drawn to other regions of the country as prods to uncooperative workers, concern about Chinese immigrants became national.
The first national legislation barring the entry of the Chinese targeted women. The proportion of women among Chinese immigrants had remained very small, and a substantial number of them—as many as 60 percent by 1870—worked as prostitutes. The Page Law, passed in 1875, ostensibly banned Chinese prostitutes from entering the country. But the examinations into their personal lives that Chinese women faced as potential immigrants discouraged most of them from even trying to enter the United States.
By 1877, the Chinese were about to become the first national population to be excluded from entering the United States. This exclusion was rooted solely in their racial identity. President Rutherford B. Hayes asserted that the Chinese “invasion” was “pernicious and should be discouraged.” Putting Chinese immigration in the context of “our experience in dealing with the weaker races—the Negroes and the Indians,” he argued, “I would consider with favor any suitable means to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores.” The effort to end Chinese immigration almost entirely would succeed a few short years later.
They had made substantial contributions to the American, and especially the Californian, economy, but they found little opportunity to make inroads in this country. Even the 1870 Civil Rights Act, which provided certain protections for Chinese immigrants, gave little solace. Senator Charles Sumner’s amendment to strike the word “white” from congressional acts related to naturalization met with widespread opposition. One senator protested, “Mongolians will never lose their identity as a peculiar and separate people.” In the ensuing years of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants in the United States would become an increasingly secluded—and exoticized—population.
Mexicans—although they are now so commonly associated with immigration, especially by its critics—were not immigrants in this era. They lived on land that became part of the United States through expansionism—through colonial conquest and usurpation justified on racial grounds. Some of the first incursions into Mexican territory came in Texas. Initially invited to settle, Anglos continued to move into the province after the Mexican government banned their migration. A revolt against the Mexican government at first involved both Anglo immigrants and Tejanos (Texas-born Mexicans), some of whose families had lived in Texas for generations. But as Arnoldo de Leon has argued, Texans never experienced enormous hardship under the Mexican government, which was thousands of miles away and wracked by internal dissension. The rebellion quickly became, in the words of historian Reginald Horsman, “a racial clash, not simply a revolt against an unjust government or tyranny.”
Relations between Tejanos and Anglos in Texas after the revolt set the tone for the Mexican American War, and for Anglo-Mexican relations after the war. A “peace structure” devised between Anglo immigrants and the Tejano ranchowning elite, especially in predominantly Mexican areas of south Texas, prevailed for a short time. According to David Montejano, ambitious Anglo men married into Tejano families, often in these early years adopting aspects of Mexican cultural identity as their own. But competition over resources doomed the peace structure. Juan Seguin, a Captain in the Texas army, had fought against Mexico at San Jacinto and would have been at the Alamo, as thirteen Tejanos were, had he not been sent out for reinforcements. In 1840 he was elected mayor of San Antonio. But Sequin’s valiant defense of Tejanos against abuses by land-hungry Anglos spelled his ruin. In 1842, he was forced to flee to Mexico, the country against which he had just fought, to protect himself and his family. At least two hundred Tejano families left San Antonio for similar reasons.
The Mexican American War, the United States’ first foreign war, was again waged as an explicitly racial conflict. Popular travel journals written by Americans like Richard Henry Dana created lasting stereotypes of sexually accessible Mexican women and slothful, inept Mexican men. Mexicans in general were derided as bestial; one Tennessee soldier described them as “more degraded than the African race among us.” Certain Americans compared them unfavorably to Indian populations and predicted that the Mexican “race” would soon become “extinct.” Americans fighting against the Mexicans dehumanized them, and acts of brutality against Mexican soldiers and citizens were widespread. In Monterey, for example, Texas Rangers made a sport of shooting Mexicans off rooftops.
The racial ideology that underscored the war did more than justify repeated acts of cruelty. It was at the heart of Americans’ sense of self-definition. “Manifest Destiny” was part of a broader assertion of racial superiority by Anglo-Saxons—who, for the first time in this country, defined themselves as a distinct racial group—and of other white ethnics who sought in its guise an explicit acceptance of their ownership of American identity. In this sense, it is not surprising that the phrase was coined by Irish immigrant John O’Sullivan. Those seeking acceptance into American society defined themselves in contrast to those outside its boundaries. For the latter, any manner of treatment was justified. As Horsman described it, “In effect, by mid-century, America’s racial theorists were explaining the enslavement of blacks, the disappearance of Indians, and the defeat of Mexicans in a manner that reflected no discredit on the people of the United States.”
Once the United States won the war, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought not only California and much of what is now the American Southwest, but also thousands of Mexicans into the country—by treaty, and as a “defeated race.” Nonetheless, Mexicans entered the political framework of this country in the legal sense in complex and not altogether unfavorable ways. On paper, the treaty promised rights that seemed surprising, given the ways that Mexicans had been positioned racially during the war. Described in disparaging terms as a mixed-race population, they were nonetheless granted citizenship rights in the treaty—rights to this point granted to people entering American civic society only if they were white. Acting on these rights, however, and especially on the right to vote, would prove difficult and often impossible.
Moreover, the treaty did little to protect Mexican claims to land ownership. The United States Senate struck a clause from the treaty that would have guaranteed protection of Mexicans’ rights to their lands. This had profound implications for the class system that had characterized the preconquest northern Mexican provinces. Tejano and Californio elites had controlled huge tracts of land in Texas and in California. Californios had relied on Indian peonage, establishing a seigneurial system to sustain the comfortable existence that Anglo travelers like Dana (whose uncle had married into a Californio family) had held in such contempt. Tejano ranchers had established a similarly paternalistic attitude toward the mestizo and Indian peones under them. Tied only marginally into the market economy, especially compared to more commercially minded Anglos, they were land rich and cash poor. Over several decades after the war, most of these rancheros lost their lands through a variety of means. Land claims were difficult and very expensive to establish in American courts, especially without treaty protection. Taxation under the new government forced many rancheros to sell off more and more of their land. Outright theft by unscrupulous Anglos was common.
Less wealthy Mexicans were often deprived of the means to provide for their livelihood. They were also frequent victims of violence. One particularly ironic example was the fate of the Californios who attempted to join the gold rush in California just months after the war. They were obligated, along with Chinese immigrants, to pay the Foreign Miners Tax—in a land in which many of their families had lived for generations. Along with the Chinese, they were also routinely assaulted, and sometimes killed, by Anglo miners who identified them as nonwhite competitors. The combination of the tax and the assaults drove them from the mines. The first Mexican woman known to have been lynched in the United States, a prostitute named Juanita, also met her fate in California in 1851.
Mexicans, in the decades after the war, resisted Anglo incursions and theft, at times informally, at times in more organized fashions. Historian Deena Gonzalez has analyzed how Mexican women in the territory of New Mexico defiantly maintained their cultural practice of unfettered public behavior and their work habits. They also strived through the courts to maintain property and inheritance rights they had enjoyed before the war. Other forms of protest were more violent. In 1859, for example, Juan Cortina, the son of a wealthy Tejano rancher, killed a Brownsville, Texas, sheriff he saw beating one of his father’s employees. That incident sparked the “Cortina War.” Cortina, who had initially fled, returned to Brownsville with sixty men, freed every Mexican prisoner he found, and executed four Anglos who had killed Mexicans and gone unpunished. Texas Rangers, unable to find him or his followers, retaliated against Mexicans throughout the region. Cortina’s brand of informal justice, which some historians have labeled “social banditry,” was reproduced throughout the 1860s and 1870s. Mexicans in the 1870s who removed cattle from Anglo ranches, for example, did not consider themselves thieves—they called it reclaiming “Nana’s cattle.” Anglo ranchers and especially Texas Rangers, whose enmity for Mexicans had only increased after the war, in turn considered killing Mexicans like “killing an enemy in the independence war.”
Battles between Mexicans and Anglos continued throughout these years. Mexicans in Texas continued to incur the wrath of ranch owner Richard King, whose ambition at one point had been to own the entire territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande once disputed by Mexico and the United States. King routinely drew on the Texas Rangers, known by some as the “King Ranch Rangers,” to go after Mexican “cattle rustlers.” By the end of 1877, battles between them had left more than a dozen Anglos and more than one hundred Mexicans dead. That same year, Anglo officials in El Paso attempted to assume control of salt beds west of the city that had traditionally been used communally by Mexican residents. Judge Charles Howard tried to claim the beds for commercial purposes. When he killed Luis Cardis, who led Mexican opposition to the move, the “El Paso Salt War” began. Angry Mexican residents of El Paso killed Howard and two other Anglos, and defeated a troop of Texas Rangers before being quelled.
By the end of this period Mexicans in the United States were in many ways a subject population. Many Tejano and Californio rancheros had lost their holdings or were in dire financial straits, or both. The process of the proletarianization of this population—its reduction largely to manual, unskilled labor—was well under way. Even vaqueros, Mexican cowboys who had had such enormous pride in their skills and who had taught many incoming Anglos, now had difficulty finding suitable work. The racial hierarchy under which Mexicans lived was clearest on the King Ranch—Mexicans worked as ranch hands, overseen by Anglos, many of whom were former Texas Rangers. Before long, as Arnoldo de Leon has pointed out, Jim Crow signs in south Texas would read “for Mexicans” instead of “for Negroes.”
The transition that African Americans made in this era was easily one of the most dramatic. They began the era as an enslaved population (only a fraction of the antebellum population was free). In 1860, the slave population in the South had reached an estimated 4 million. Slave labor sustained all major southern crop production—rice, sugar, tobacco, and especially cotton. Though perhaps in less immediately obvious ways than the other populations discussed in this essay, African Americans too were profoundly affected by the major developments occurring in American society. Expansionism and industrialization in the North and West combined to put the North and South on a collision course that led to civil war. By the end of this era African Americans had been freed, though with the end of Reconstruction the racial challenges they faced remained daunting at best.
The nature of slave labor varied enormously according to where slaves worked. Enslaved African Americans worked not only on various crops throughout the South, but also in both urban and rural settings, on small farms and enormous plantations, in masters’ houses and in surrounding fields. Under slavery, everyone worked—men, women, and, as soon as they were able, children. Field hands labored from sunrise to sunset, and even longer during harvest time. House slaves performed a wide range of tasks, including cooking, cleaning, serving as butlers and valets, and providing care for young children. This work was often less physically taxing than field work, and provided access to more and better food. Work in the proximity of whites meant access to valuable information—especially as the war approached. But house servants also were expected to be on twenty-four-hour call, and compelled to live away from family and friends, and from the sustenance of slave culture. The small number of slaves who worked as artisans, or who lived in urban areas, often had increased opportunities. Masters who “hired out” their slaves sometimes let them keep some of their wages. There were even instances in which masters let them buy their freedom. Urban areas and work with free men and women also provided tremendous access to information—and even chances to escape.
But despite these slim windows of opportunity, slavery as a system was based on coercion and cruelty. Slave owners relied on violence, or the threat of it, to maintain control over the human beings they owned. Whippings were commonplace, and dismemberment of particularly recalcitrant slaves was not unheard of. Enslaved women could face not only these punishments but routine sexual abuse as well. Escaped slave Harriet Jacobs wrote of the horror of having lost her virginity when she was raped by the man who owned her. Rebellious slaves could also be punished through sale away from their loved ones, or by having their spouses or children sold. An estimated one in five slave marriages were broken up by sale; one in three children were sold away from their families.
Nor was sale or forced migration necessarily administered as punishment—it was often a product of American expansionism. Crop production, especially in cotton, shifted westward in the decades before the Civil War. Whereas in 1810, 80 percent of slaves had lived in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, by 1860 one in three slaves lived in the fabled “black belt” spanning Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and further west. An estimated 1.5 million slaves had been forced to migrate west during that half century.
In the face of unrelenting hardship, enslaved African Americans strived to establish space for their own humanity. They relied first and foremost on their families. Slave men and women routinely fought for control over their choices of marriage partner and over the process of childbirth—midwives were valued members of their communities. Slave women formed informal networks—quilting and sewing circles, systems of shared labor away from the fields—that sustained them socially and spiritually. Slave culture was also organized centrally around the church and religious ritual. By 1860, most enslaved African Americans professed some sort of Christianity.
Their relationship to Christianity, however, was a complex one. As scholar Sterling Stuckey has argued, under slavery they created a synthetic religious faith that merged African burial ceremonies, circle rituals, and ring shouts with Christian practices. In Stuckey’s words, “Christianity provided a protective exterior beneath which more complex, less familiar [to outsiders] religious principles and practices were operative.” These aspects of African religions facilitated the synthesis of diverse African ethnicities into a singular culture—circle rituals, for example, were central to a number of African populations in one form or another. They also enabled people to retain ties to their homeland or, eventually, to the homes of their ancestors, up to and beyond the last days of slavery. When Frederick Law Olmstead traveled through the South in the 1850s, for example, he declared that three-fourths of the slaves on Louisiana and Mississippi plantations were profoundly influenced by African survivals.
The establishment of an African American culture, and the insistence on preserving aspects of African culture, were both survival strategies and implicit forms of resistance. They were by no means the only ones. Although there were few slave rebellions after Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt, one important exception was the Seminole Wars in Florida. The Seminole Indian community had been a haven for runaway slaves since the colonial era, and by the 1830s it was in open resistance to the American government. Most resistance occurred on a much more personal level. Occasionally slaves violently attacked their masters, but retribution for these acts was so fierce that resistance was usually much more subtle. Feigning illness, breaking tools, mistreating livestock, destroying crops—all of these were acts of resistance that occurred daily during slavery.
There were also 225,000 free blacks in the North on the eve of the Civil War, and a smaller and shrinking number in the South, whose very existence was an indictment of the implicit assumption that African Americans could not survive, much less prosper, outside of slavery. But they lived very difficult lives, enduring increasing discrimination and segregation in the North, and ever more urgent efforts to expel them or return them to slavery in the South. They had few employment options available to them, and even these began to disappear when European, and especially Irish, immigrants entered the country. As Frederick Douglass noted, “Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room perhaps for some newly arrived immigrants, whose hunger and color are thought to give them a title to special favor.” There were nonetheless instances of resistance to their conditions, and to the conditions endured by African American slaves. Martin Delany, who was able to trace his family roots back to African royalty, called for an early version of African nationalism, and even briefly attempted to organize a collective return to Africa. Free blacks in the North, moreover, were among the first and most enthusiastic participants in the abolitionist movement.
They contributed enormously to growing tensions between anti- and proslavery forces in the decades leading up to the Civil War. In the 1830s and 1840s, the abolitionist movement both grew and diversified, as more and more whites and blacks organized to voice their opposition to slavery. By 1840, political, religious, and radical factions had emerged as abolitionists split over the means to attack slavery. These abolitionist forces were countered by increasingly vehement defenses of slavery emerging out of the South. In the decades immediately following the Revolutionary war, many southern slave owners had rationalized slavery as a “necessary evil”—difficult to justify, but absolutely essential to the southern, and the American, economy. By the 1830s, in the face of slave rebellions, economic downturns, and especially the flood of abolitionist literature making its way into the South, southern slave owners began to argue that slavery was, in the words of John Calhoun, a “positive good.” Southern politicians and academicians worked in the ensuing decades to defend slavery and to compare it favorably to capitalist labor relations in the North. They viewed the emergence of the Republican Party in the 1850s with considerable alarm. The new party was staunchly antislavery, though its members were hardly of one mind on racial equality. Some Republicans were abolitionists and upholders of the principle of racial equality. But even more were former Free-Soilers, many of whom wanted neither slavery nor blacks moving into new territories in the West. Disagreement over slavery finally erupted into war in 1861.
The ultimate act of African American rebellion against slavery was their participation in the Civil War. Free blacks from the North and South threw themselves into the war effort. Slaves ran away by the tens of thousands, attaching themselves to Union armies, enduring dismal conditions in “contraband” camps, and offering their services in whatever way possible. Although their assistance was refused early in the war, and they were often relegated to menial labor behind the scenes, blacks organized their first regiment in 1862; the following year, they were fighting on the front lines. By 1865, 186,000 blacks had participated in the war effort.
Postwar Reconstruction represented a seemingly extraordinary opportunity for blacks. Eric Foner described the period as “a massive experiment in interracial democracy.” The era held out the promise—though in many ways, only the promise—of freedom. Again in Foner’s words, “‘freedom’ itself became a terrain of conflict.” Every aspect of freedom African Americans sought—personal, institutional, political, and economic—was contested by former slave owners and other southern whites.
Nonetheless, blacks after the war were able to act autonomously in unprecedented ways. They reasserted the centrality of family life; literally thousands left their homes in an effort to find spouses, children, and other loved ones who had been sold away under slavery. They reestablished gender roles within their families; the opportunity for black women not to have to work in the fields was extremely important. African Americans were now free to establish their own churches. By 1877, almost all southern blacks had left white-dominated churches for autonomous institutions like the African Methodist Episcopal Church. They sought not only education but the opportunity to educate themselves; by 1869, black teachers outnumbered white ones in the South. Blacks took advantage of the Fifteenth Amendment not just by voting; they won office in the Reconstruction South in remarkable numbers. All told, African Americans won six hundred legislative seats; between 1868 and 1876, fourteen blacks served as U.S. congressional representatives; two were elected as U.S. Senators; and six served as lieutenant governors.
But the central issue in the minds of many newly freed American citizens was economic. Many blacks fully anticipated that the federal government would provide them the fabled “forty acres and a mule” in return for generations of uncompensated labor. The hope was by no means unfounded. In January 1865, Union General William T. Sherman set aside lands to be distributed to blacks in allotments of forty acres; he later added a proviso enabling the army to loan mules to blacks on these lands. Congress took up a broader land distribution program after the war. But no such program was ever instituted; in fact, lands that had been awarded to blacks to farm and improve were in many instances confiscated. Freed blacks soon found themselves under enormous pressure—often from the Freedman’s Bureau, which had been established to oversee their transition to freedom—to sign labor contracts. Their work producing cotton and other crops vital to the southern economy, in some cases on the same plantations they had worked as slaves, soon devolved into a binding system of sharecropping. Working “on shares” offered blacks some semblance of autonomy. But in the cash-poor South, sharecroppers quickly became indebted to exploitive credit merchants. Most ended up in a form of debt peonage, in which the produce women grew became absolutely essential to survival, and from which the only escape was death.
Just as the prospect of economic freedom seemed increasingly remote by the end of Reconstruction, so too did many other freedoms. Most states and localities had passed Black Codes right after the war—oppressive laws that punished blacks severely for a wide range of offenses. After these laws were overturned, whites still sought to control and intimidate blacks at every turn. Even under Reconstruction governments, even having organized themselves into Union League militias, blacks could never be sure of their personal safety. They were killed for petty offenses—for refusal to work, for “insolence,” even for being seen as too ambitious. One estimate was that more than two thousand blacks were killed in 1865 alone around Shreveport, Louisiana; another one thousand were reported murdered in Texas between 1865 and 1868. The atmosphere of terror that many southern whites sought to create among newly freed blacks had sexual overtones as well. During Reconstruction, many white southerners still considered black women to be sexually accessible. They acted without fear of punishment. As Deborah Gray White points out, from the end of the Civil War through two-thirds of the twentieth century, no southern white man was convicted of raping a black woman.
Blacks who sought to buy their own land, or who ran for office, became targets of the Ku Klux Klan. Formed in 1869, the KKK served as the armed militia of the Democratic Party in the South, attacking white—but especially black—members of the Republican Party and the Union Leagues. By the time the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871 were passed, giving the federal government sweeping powers to combat the Klan, it had driven blacks and sympathetic whites from politics in the South.
The Republicans did make one last attempt to assist the efforts of blacks to combat discrimination in the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 outlawed discrimination against blacks in public places. But the law ultimately accomplished little in the eight years before the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. A critical clause mandating integrated schools in the South did not pass. The enforcement procedure, moreover, compelled blacks to take their cases to federal court, which was a preventively expensive and cumbersome process. The following year, the Republicans’ secretive bargain with the Democrats to resolve disagreement over the election of 1876 signaled the end of the era.
The removal of federal troops in 1877, not from the South entirely, as legend has it, but from the statehouses they had been defending in Louisiana and South Carolina, did not mark the abrupt end of Reconstruction. But it spelled its inevitable demise. The era of promise for blacks ended slowly and unevenly; the South did not begin to pass formal segregation legislation until the early 1880s. But the implications were already clear. Blacks were, in Foner’s words, “enmeshed in a seamless web of oppression, whose interwoven economic, political, and social strands all reinforced one another.”
American expansionism had dramatic effects on every person living in the United States. But its most profound, and devastating, effect was on American Indians, people who in these years were defined as outside the boundaries of American society. European colonizers, then land-hungry Americans, had been moving into Indian territory and pushing Indians off their lands, either by force or through negotiations, from the first days of contact. Between 1837 and 1877 this process continued with a vengeance, until the fates of Indian populations were all but sealed.
As the era began, one of the most important moments in the history of Indian displacement was just being concluded. In 1837, Cherokees were on the “Trail of Tears,” their forced march during which thousands died en route to a newly constructed Indian territory in what became Oklahoma. They had made concerted efforts to assimilate themselves into American society. By the time of the coerced removal they had their own newspaper and a constitution modeled on the American document; some Cherokees even owned African American slaves. But the federal government and anxious American farmers and settlers made it clear that Indians, that “illfated race” in the words of Andrew Jackson, had no place in American society. This was the deeper meaning of this removal. As Richard White put it, “Removal made it clear that there was no room for a common world that included independent Indians living with whites.” The Jeffersonian notion that assimilated Indians could live among Americans was no longer deemed a possibility.
Their removal was a harbinger of things to come for American Indians. Indian communities already in the Southwest and West faced increasing encroachment on their land, both from other Indians forced into their territories and from Americans seeking land and wealth. Through the middle of the 1840s, federal officials were nonetheless still able to make promises to Indian populations like the Cherokees that they would be undisturbed in their new homes. They constructed an Indian territory on the assumption that American movement west would not prohibit the possibility of a “permanent Indian frontier.” This frontier would define the outer boundary of the United States, beyond which Indians could live freely. If the possibility of inclusion of Indian populations within the country no longer existed, at least they could live in relative safety on their own. This possibility too disappeared after the Mexican American War. American victory in the war, and the prospect of settlement on the vast territory it brought into the United States, meant there would be no safe haven for Indian populations between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The threat to Indian ways of life as Americans engulfed them was already evident in the fates of those who had resisted Jackson’s policy of removal. The Choctaw, who had managed to remain in the Southeast rather than moving to the Indian territory that became Oklahoma, fought to keep their cultural traditions alive. They held on to their language, unlike those who had made the move, and they had remained a matrilineal culture. But under increasing pressure from the United States government, their efforts to preserve their culture and traditions faltered. Men who married into the Choctaw community found it impossible to substantiate their wives’ land claims in American courts. By the end of the 1850s, the matrilineality of the Choctaws in Mississippi was under serious challenge, and male descent lines were being privileged.
The effort to break down Indian cultural identity became systematic with the formal implementation of the reservation system. There had been reservations east of the Mississippi, but with the end of the prospect of the permanent Indian frontier, reservations became national policy. In theory, their purposes were clear-cut: to remove Indians from travel routes and from areas being settled by Euro-Americans and to attempt, in the words of one federal official, “the great work of regenerating the Indian race.” Reservations were supposed to protect Indians by separating them from Euro-American settlers and to facilitate their assimilation—to detribalize and individualize them. In reality, the reservation system was put into place unevenly and even haphazardly. As Richard White has suggested, it “was an improvisation the way survivors of a shipwreck might fashion a raft from the debris of the sunken vessel.” Any high-minded ideas about protecting Indians were quickly subsumed under the more pressing effort—in terms of the imperatives of American expansion—to enclose and imprison them. It was an effort that would be successful only after a series of fierce wars fought on the Plains and further west, and one that would leave most Indians either dead or bereft of the cultural and material resources to live their lives on their own terms.
There was only one area of Indian settlement that remained relatively peaceful in the two decades after the Mexican American War—Indian territory in present-day Oklahoma, where many Cherokees and others among the Five Civilized Tribes (the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles) had been forced to relocate. They spent much of the first decade simply trying to reestablish a sense of unity within the tribes themselves, who had been divided by bitter disagreements over the issue of removal. But within a very short time, they were able to recreate much of their society—still based significantly on the American model—in their new homes. As Robert Utley notes, by the 1850s their public school systems were better than those in Arkansas or Missouri.
But this peace did not prevail elsewhere. Despite the efforts of those like the Five Civilized Tribes who tried to adopt American ways, Indians continued to be seen as savages standing in the way of civilization. In fact, as scholars like Matthew Jacobson and David Roediger have argued in other contexts, the definition of Indians (and various other nonwhites) as savages was an essential foundation of the definition of civilization itself. As Roediger pointed out, “‘Civilization’ continued to define itself as a negation of ‘savagery’—indeed, to invent savagery in order to define itself.”
During the 1850s and the 1860s, in every corner of the country west of the Mississippi, Indian populations resisted the reservation system, trying to maintain their autonomy and independence, and Americans sought to contain them through negotiation, betrayal, and, ultimately, violence. The United States’ effort to turn reservations into national policy was rarely very successful. The reservation system was brutally implemented in Oregon and Washington. It failed terribly in Texas and in California, where Indians were murdered by the thousands by gold rushers. Navajo resistance in New Mexico led to another, if less famous, forced removal. In 1864 the Navajos endured a “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo, a reservation across the New Mexico territory from their established homeland. Conditions on the reservation were so severe that General William Sherman compared it to Andersonville, the infamous Confederate prisoner of war camp. They would not be permitted to return to a reservation on a reduced section of their homeland until 1868.
Meanwhile, some of the fiercest Indian resistance occurred on the Plains, especially after 1865, when the United States turned its attention from the Civil War back to the West. Warfare between American forces and Plains Indians like the Cheyenne, the Arapahoes, the Lakotas, the Comanches, and the Kiowas became incredibly brutal. Despite the lines between civilization and savagery that they wished to draw so neatly between themselves and Indian populations, white combatants and their supporters often behaved in utterly shocking ways. In one attack on a group of Cheyenne encamped in Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864—there because their leader, Black Kettle, was attempting to negotiate a peace settlement—Colorado soldiers killed two hundred people, most of them women and children. They scalped and mutilated their bodies and paraded their remains through the streets of Denver. At a local theater, according to one historian, “Theater patrons applauded a display of Cheyenne scalps, some of them of women’s pubic hair, strung across the stage at intermission.” Though these soldiers were forced out of the service, they remained heroes to many in Colorado. Despite having legitimized any and all methods of warfare by thoroughly dehumanizing their foes, American soldiers remained unable to secure Indians on reservations through the 1860s.
There were brief moments when the American government attempted to negotiate some sort of peace with resistant Indian populations. A Peace Commission was established after the Civil War, and Ulysses Grant tried to implement a Peace Policy during the first term of his Presidency. Certain Indian leaders were willing to negotiate—Black Kettle had been attempting to do so in Colorado; Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud visited Washington, D.C., in 1870 on a similar mission. But the end goal of the American government—settlement of all of the land from ocean to ocean—and the perspective most Americans shared of Indians—that they were a race of savages who could not exist within the boundaries of American civilization—made the outcome of these efforts predictable.
By 1877, Indian populations were almost completely enclosed on reservations. Neither battle nor flight proved effective. In June 1876, a collection of Indian tribes killed an overconfident General Custer and all of his men at the Little Bighorn in Montana. Despite the exhilaration the battle evoked, retribution against the victors was swift and fierce. A year later, Chief Joseph and what remained of the Nez Perce raced American troops to Canada. In October 1877 they were caught, just forty miles shy of the border. Sitting Bull and a few Sioux would not surrender until 1881; Geronimo and a handful of Apaches would hold out until 1886.
Most historians agree that Indians’ ultimate confinement on reservations was not the result of a military defeat. In the words of historian Elliott West, they “were not muscled on to reservations because soldiers defeated and sometimes butchered them. They ended up there because they lost command of the resources they needed to live as they wished.” What they fought, in other words, were battles not only over territory, but also over the right to maintain control over their identity and their culture. These are battles that in many ways continue to the present day.
This essay has argued the central importance of racial identity in determining the experience of the various racial and ethnic groups who, through various means, came to be included in—or excluded from—American society between 1837 and 1877. American expansionism and industrialization left no population within the United States untouched; distinct experiences of those developments, however, were defined by racial identity and by the racial hierarchy that was reformulated in this era.
It has also sought to provide an overview of Irish, German, Chinese, Mexican, African American, and American Indian experiences in the United States between 1837 and 1877; this is a far more hazardous task than generating a framework within which to understand their particular relations to this country. Inevitably, in a brief summary of the historical experiences of any population, generalizations can hide as much as they reveal. In the hope of suggesting the underlying complexity of each population’s history, this essay will sketch out one more issue before closing—how regional distinctions might complicate perceptions of each of these populations.
The experiences of each population varied widely, though to considerably differing degrees, across the regions of the United States. As Matthew Jacobson has argued, Irish immigrants’ relationship to whiteness was not the same on the East Coast as it was in California. In New York, when these immigrants rioted against the draft in 1863, they were compared to savage Indians. In California, they merged with and often led other whites united to fight against labor competition from the Chinese. There are other possible complications as well. In Texas, several Anglo ranchers—including the King family, with its enormous holdings—were Irish immigrants or of Irish descent. They ruled over the Mexican population who worked under them with increasingly autocratic power. In New Mexico, on the other hand, many Irish men married Nuevomexicanas and adopted their culture as their own. In Texas and New Mexico, in other words, there were still other possible variations of Irish immigrants’ relation to whiteness.
For German immigrants, regional variations were as compelling, if less racially charged. In urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest, the involvement in unions and the radical politics of certain German workers and intellectuals concerned wary Americans. Away from the cities, German immigrants could more easily look like defenders of the American heartland. In western Pennsylvania, for example, German immigrants were prominent on the juries that sat in judgment of the Molly Maguires.
For Chinese immigrants, increasingly maligned nationally as threats to the racial sanctity of the nation, regional variations mattered less but were nonetheless evident. In the late 1860s, after the transcontinental railroad was completed and when Chinese immigrants were increasingly confined to racial economic niches, they were still recruited by employers in the South and the Northeast. Their recruitment was cynical; they were used as strikebreakers in Massachusetts and as prods to ex-slaves in the South. But the fact remains that at this point, away from California, there were certain employers who remained willing to see Chinese immigrants as something other than a threat.
For Mexicans who became Mexican Americans after the war, regional differences reflected profound cultural differences. Californios, Tejanos, and Nuevomexicanos had much in common, but there were also significant differences in their cultural practices. In California, for example, a distinctive Californio culture had emerged by the time of the conquest, centered around ample leisure time and flamboyant ceremonies and celebrations. And although the wealthy among each population suffered the loss of land and prestige, there are historians who argue that Nuevomexicanos were able to hold on to more of their power and influence than the others. Not only was New Mexico less rich in resources and thus less attractive to incoming Anglos, but some wealthy Mexicans in New Mexico, though by no means all, claimed pure Spanish lineage—claimed, in other words, that they were white descendants of Europeans and had no Indian ancestors. Elite Tejanos and Californios made similar claims, and eventually they all found themselves surrounded by Anglos who rejected these assertions of racial purity. Nonetheless, many Nuevomexicanos continue to make these racial claims in the present day.
Likewise for American Indian populations, regional differences underscored significant cultural differences. Most Indian populations had certain things in common—subsistence economies, the worship of nature, and some sense of collective ownership of property. But Sioux living on the grassy plains, Pueblos living in the arid Southwest, and Yakima living on the plush West Coast, for example, constructed their lives, their cultures, and their traditions very differently. These differences were based on numerous factors, including what their natural environments did or did not provide, and the number, or lack, of foes or allies surrounding them. As with the Mexican population, the region in which various Indians lived also determined the nature of their interaction with Euro-Americans. Although few if any Indians avoided the onus of conquest, the severity of their experience varied considerably. In California, gold rushers engaged in a murderous campaign against the Indian population, whose numbers fell from 150,000 in 1845 to 35,000 in 1860. In the nearby southwest, by stark contrast, certain Indian populations were left relatively free to remain true to their culture and traditions. In the 1860s, for example, the United States government largely ignored Kiowa and Comanche raids against Anglos and Mexicans in Texas. As Utley describes it, the Indian raiders “had always regarded Texans, like Mexicans, as a people distinct from Americans—a view reinforced by the … Civil War.”
For African Americans, the contrast between regions for much of this period could not have been more stark—the South meant slavery, and the North, freedom. Their hope that change of location—that regional variation—would bring better things remained strong in the face of the disappointments that came with the end of Reconstruction. In 1877, African American “exodusters” founded Nicodemus, Kansas, one of their first communities in the West, hopeful that they had left the angry white South and an increasingly cynical North behind.
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blassingame, John. The Slave Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 [rev. 1979].
When first published in 1972, Blassingame’s book was one of the first to examine slave culture and slave life systematically. He takes up issues of African heritage, culture and family, plantation life, resistance, and slave personality types.
Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.
Chan provides a synthesis of Asian American history with an overt interpretive edge, focusing particularly on placing Asian Americans in a global perspective.
Chen, Jack. The Chinese of America. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980.
Chen’s book is a thorough examination of Chinese American culture, from earliest arrivals through exclusion to the post–World War II era.
Conzen, Kathleen Neils. Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836–1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.
This community study traces the German American presence and involvement in Milwaukee from its earliest days, placing issues of the construction of ethnic identity and eventual accommodation in the context of other immigrant groups and the city’s public culture.
De Leon, Arnoldo. They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.
This pointed analysis traces the emergence of Anglo Texans’ anti-Mexican attitudes through the Texas revolt and the antebellum and postbellum eras.
Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Diner analyzes the culture of Irish immigrant women and their relations with American society and culture through their familial connections, work experiences, and associational life.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
This masterful book is now the standard work on Reconstruction. He draws together existing scholarship on the era and creates a new frame for this comprehensive study by emphasizing the experiences, actions, and goals of the newly freed African American population.
Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.
Genovese’s classic study examines slave culture in the context of slave-owner paternalism. He explores the possibilities of acquiescence and resistance to slavery, finding in the culture of enslaved African Americans a form of “protonationalism.”
Gonzalez, Deena. Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820–1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gonzalez’s work makes effective use of archival sources like wills and trial transcripts to reveal how Spanish-Mexican women faced, and responded to, and resisted Anglo colonizing efforts in New Mexico.
Griswold del Castillo, Richard. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
Griswold del Castillo offers a detailed study of the treaty that ended the Mexican American war, focusing on its impact on the new Mexican American population.
Gutman, Herbert. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. New York: Random House, 1977.
Gutman asserts the autonomy of the African American family both during and after slavery. He argues that slave families were constituted not only within, but despite slave owners’ paternalism. He also counters arguments by sociologists Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, who argued the dysfunctionality of the African American family.
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Reginald Horsman links the development of American racial ideology, and particularly Anglo-Saxons’ explicit identification as a distinctive racial group, to American expansionism in the 1840s and 1850s.
Jacobson, Matthew. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Jacobson’s complex and rich work explores a wide variety of historical documents and cultural products in analyzing the construction of whiteness—and the challenges many European immigrants faced in asserting their whiteness—throughout American history.
Johannsen, Robert W. To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Johannsen argues that the United States’ first foreign war produced both assertions of American identity and the demonization and degradation of Mexicans.
Kenny, Kevin. Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Kenny uses impressive empirical evidence and postmodern methodologies to explore the enigmatic Molly Maguires, and to place them in the broader context of Irish ethnic identity formation.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.
One of the first synthetic works to substantially revise American Western history, Limerick’s book presents the region in all of its racial complexity.
Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
This standard work in Irish immigrant history focuses especially on the exile mentality of the Irish.
Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.
Montejano’s work analyzes relations between Mexicans and Anglos from the Texas revolt to the very recent past, from the short-lived “peace structure” through land confiscation and anti-Mexican Jim Crow laws to a new period of relative inclusion and equality.
Pitt, Leonard. The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
Pitt’s path-breaking work analyzes the distinctive Californio culture and its demise at the hands of encroaching Anglo Americans.
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness. New York: Verso Press, 1991.
Roediger analyzes the implications of whiteness for the construction of working class identity in the decades before and just after the Civil War. He focuses centrally, especially in his last section, on the efforts of Irish immigrants to establish, and to benefit from, their identity as white.
Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Saxton explores the complex reasons for the emergence of anti-Chinese sentiment in California, especially among white workers. He argues that Chinese immigrants were “indispensable,” not only for the inexpensive labor they provided but because their presence served to galvanize the white working class as few other issues did.
Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundation of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Stuckey offers a compelling argument for African survivals in African American slave culture and beyond. He reads emergent black nationalist and liberation thought into the 1940s through this Africanist lens.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.
Takaki offers a comprehensive synthetic examination of the history of Asians in the United States.
Trommler, Frank, and Joseph McVeigh, eds. America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
This collection provides a number of useful essays on German American immigration, ethnicity and politics, language, and literature.
Utley, Robert. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.
Utley explores the last fifty years of open conflict between Indian populations and the expansionist United States, from the 1840s through the “passing of the frontier” in 1890.
West, Elliott. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1998.
In this provocative book, West argues that the battle between Indians and whites over the Great Plains, specifically Colorado, was a contest over resources that both, in their own ways, were illprepared to fight.
White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.
In this highly readable study, Deborah Gray White explores the distinctive world of the enslaved African American woman. She examines stereotypical images of women slaves, family and work life, women’s networks under slavery, and the particular dangers that enslaved women faced. She closes with a chapter on African American women after slavery.
White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
This broad revisionist survey of American Western history focuses centrally on the frequently combative and destructive interactions between racial groups in the region.
Weitz, a wool weaver, immigrated to the United States in 1854. His letter speaks to working conditions in his new home, as well as to the associational life that is emerging in the German immigrant community.
Source: Walter D. Kamphoefner, Woflgang Helbich and Ulrike Soommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 342–342, 346; © C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlunug (Oscar Beck), Munich, 1988; translation © 1991 by Cornell University.
ROCKVILLE, JULY 29TH, 1855
Dear devoted father, brother, sister-in-law, and children,
Should my letter reach you in good health, I will be overjoyed. Finally I have fulfilled my longing for you by sending a small gift, I couldn’t do it any earlier since I was doing very poorly. Last year from October until March 16th this year I didn’t have any work, the factory in Astoria had stopped work. I had to pay 10 dollars training fee. Every newcomer who comes here has to pay, when I had worked it off there was no more work there. From there we went to another factory, a fur factory, there we had rotten jobs where our hands got all swollen up but it didn’t last long. Finally we couldn’t get any money then I also lost a lot so I made it through the winter splitting wood for a man in Astoria who wasn’t able so I could earn some money. But it wasn’t enough. I looked around for work in New York and the area, but all for nothing, if I had been able to speak English I could’ve gotten a job but I can’t. I didn’t have any money to move on, you can imagine it was terrible. Thousands and thousands were wandering around without work, without money, without food, dying of hunger. They’ve set up places where they could get lunch but it isn’t enough. They poured through the town in great droves demanding that work be found for them, but all for nothing. All over America it was terrible, many hundreds of Fektori, that means Fabricke, had stopped work, prices went way up and still are, it should not be called America but Malerika. It is easy to say you want to go to America but the hard things they never think about. [dangers of ocean voyage] The second point is when you arrive here and don’t understand English, you stand there, eyes wide open, like a calf with its throat cut. You have to be careful, they say, there’s a greenhorn. How many hundred are lied to and cheated, no one can be careful enough. In Neu Jork every day there’s murder, theft, suicide, lies and cheating, and in any large town in America. If you want to come to America you just can’t let that scare you off. You have to think the best, the worst comes later. I don’t want to advise anyone not to come, whoever wants to come should come. It’s best if you have a friend here who gets you a job in a good state. Dear father and brother, thank God I now have a good job. On March 16th in the newspaper there was a call for 25 weavers in a wool Fektori in Rockville in the state of Conecticut to sign up on the 17th at 6 o’clock in the evening. We went there and were accepted. On the 18th we got on the steamboat and went to Hartford, from there to Rockville, first I had to sell my watch otherwise I couldn’t have gotten there. When we arrived there in the afternoon they said you have to work nights from 6:30 in the evening till 6:30 in the morning, then we were shocked. I said I didn’t care if I only have work, the looms all work by themselves, they are all driven by water, I’d never woven on such a loom. I went to a fellow who taught me during the day, then work started. It didn’t go well of course in the beginning, they do difficult patterns. In March and April I didn’t earn much, I hardly had enough for Board, in July 19½ dollars. Now it’s getting better, if you do good work, you earn 18–20 to 24–25 dollars. Dear father, I am now very content with my situation, I’ll stay here. Last winter sometimes I just wanted to jump into the water, if you don’t have a job in America it’s a terrible thing, I can’t thank God enough that I have work and am healthy. Here in the Willischtz [village], that means klein Städtgen or Dorf there are almost 250 Germans who work in the Feckteri, there are 11 Feckterie here. If you don’t like it in one you go to another, 3 more are being built. If anyone from Schotten wants to come here, he should come. Springtime is the best, if he has money he can buy land in the state of Wisconsin, it seems to be another Germany, it’s healthy there. Where I am in Rockville in the state of Connecticut, 180 miles from Neu Jork, it’s also very healthy, the climate seems to me like over there, we had in English 100 degrees of heat, but of course it’s not as healthy here in America as over there in Germany. The harvest here in America looks good and there’s hope that things will be cheaper than a while ago. There is Temperes [temperance] here, that means there’s no alcoholic spirits allowed, no beer, no brandy, wine, etc. In many states there’s been serious fighting like in the state of Ohio, in Cincinati there was a blood-bath, the Germans won, there were many dead and wounded on both sides. The Jenkeamerikaner [Yankees], they call themselves Nounorthing [Know-Nothing] yankees, they want to have control, but democracy wins, it looks like there’s going to be a revolution. Every Sunday you have to go to church, then the factory bosses like you, you don’t learn anything bad there, if you understand English or not, that’s fine with me. I can go there. With the singing clubs and music, there the Germans in America are on the rise, they earn a lot of respect for that. Even we in Rockville, we have 2 singing clubs. With our German singing we earn great respect. In Neu Jork there was a big song festival that drew a lot of applause from the Americans. I am here in a German BoardingHaus, I have to pay 9 dollars a month which is cheap, you may think it’s a lot, but you have to remember that the dollar can’t be counted as more than the guilder over there. I can’t spend any money except for tobacco, I haven’t drunk any Brenti [brandy] in three months. Every noon there’s soup, vegetables and meat, every morning and evening meat, cheese and butter. Every morning we get up at 5 o’clock, at 5 thirty the bells ring, we go to the factory till 12 o’clock noon, at 1 o’clock we go in again until half past 6, at 8 o’clock it’s already night. At 4 o’clock in the morning it is already daylight. When the sun goes down it gets dark right away. The difference between you and us is when we get up in the morning it’s 11 o’clock over there, it’s almost 6 hours. Leuning and I are the only ones here from Schotten, Leuning and his family like it very much here too, we work in one Fektori. We hardly see each other all day long, it’s so big. His son Adam works in our Fektori. We live a mile apart, don’t see each other often.
Heck immigrated to the United States with her husband Nikolaus in 1854. Her eternal optimism is evident in her account of the Civil War and her husband’s participation in it—Nikolaus never rose above the rank of private.
Source: Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Soommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 373–375; © C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlunug (Oscar Beck), Munich, 1988. Translation © 1991 by Cornell University.
NEW YORK, OCTOBER 26, 1862
Dearest sister, brother-in-law and all at home,
I can no longer keep from writing to you, since I have been in America for 8 years and have only received one letter from you, to let you know how I am. I am still hale and hearty. But these are sad times now in America. I imagine you’ve heard about it, that is the murderous war that we in the North are fighting against the South, in which almost all the average people, most of them German, are involved. The war has already lasted over a whole year and it has already cost a hundred thousand lives and there’s no end in sight. My husband, Nikolaus Heck, is also among them. Since October 1st he’s been away from the family for a year. But thank the Lord I am well taken care of. He is a first lieutenant in the 52nd Regiment in Company 2. He receives 60 talers a month. Now, though, because of the bravery he showed in 3–4 battles he has become an Oberst, that is a colonel. He has command over the entire regiment. The whole regiment is made up of Germans. They were 1000 men strong when they marched away from here. But now with the hardships they have suffered, though, the cold in the winter and in all the many battles, only half that number remain. The decoration that he received over in Berlin helped him to get this high rank here, and also the large number of Prussian officers who are here fighting in the war. For there are 120 regiments, all made up of Germans. Most of the soldiers had never been soldiers in Germany. Almost all of those who had been soldiers over in Germany have received the rank of colonel. Now as a colonel he earns 100 talers a month, I get my payments every week; that is I get 5 dollars a week. Heck sends me all his money every two months. He gets clothing and food all for free. A common soldier gets 13 talers a month, a Feldwebel 30, a sergeant 20 talers a month and the family, every wife gets 5 talers a week until the war is over. They’ve all enlisted for 3 years. If the war ends earlier than that, they’ll all come home. Heck is still in good health. He is now in Washington, the capital of North America. He wrote and told me that I should bring the children and come to see him, he wants to see us so badly. We haven’t seen each other for over a year. Now you can well imagine how overjoyed we will be when we see each other again. We will be even happier than we were over there when he returned from Berlin. I receive a letter from him every week, sometimes 2. The state of New York had to supply over 100 regiments. Now though they can’t get any new people. Now they’re drafting until next week. Then it will hit a lot of people before they have their number. When he comes home safely, every man receives 100 talers. If a man dies or falls in battle, his wife receives a pension for the rest of her life, that is 8 talers a month, as well as the 100 talers.
My dear brother-in-law, I have already saved a lot of money. Should Heck be injured, I will be well taken care of. Should he never return, which I hope will not be the case, it can be that we will see each other again. And if Heck returns safely I want to make him happy by letting him go to Germany, even if a few hundred go to blazes. He wrote to me when I come home safely we should travel to Germany. Then we will give a ball and I will invite all our good friends. So you needn’t worry about me. I am doing very well. But the dear Lord should bring him back safely. The 8 years that we have been married we have led a wonderful life together and neither of us has made the other angry in the least. My dear sister, I want to let you know that I still have 2 children, a girl named Evchen and a boy named Nekchen [nickname for Nikolaus]. I lost a five-year-old boy to dropsy. Now it’s about a year ago, when my husband left. His whole regiment helped bury him. My daughter is 7 years old and my little boy 2 years and three months old. My dear brother-in-law, everything here is very expensive, all the food. [2 ll.: examples] I believe that you in Germany will feel the effects of the war that’s going on here. My dear sister, time doesn’t hang heavy here. I’m living among nothing but Germans, and the husbands of all the women here have gone off to war. I don’t need to do any work but my housework. [asks about health of the family; postal delivery service in New York; relatives should also write to her husband; greetings; address]
This report speaks not only to the challenges that even German immigrants faced upon arrival and during recurrent economic depressions in the United States but also to their rich associational life.
Source: Frederick Binder and David Reimers, eds. The Way We Lived: Essays and Documents in American Social History, vol. 1, 1492–1877, 4th. ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 224–226. From “Annual Report of the German Society for April, 1857–1858” (Chicago: Chg. Sonne, 1858), in Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
Our attention has been focused on preventing the swindling of immigrants by innkeepers and their runners in and around the train stations. We had presented the city council with recommendations for laws to this effect and obtained their passage. One ordinance enacted in June requires that a licensed German innkeeper or runner present a business card when recommending his inn to arriving passengers. The card must give the following information in both English and German: name of the innkeeper, name of the inn and the street where it is located, the cost of meals per day, the cost of a room per night and per week, and whether he transports his guests with or without charge to and from his inn.
In order to see if and how the police were enforcing the new ordinances, the agent and I made an inspection of the various train stations, during which we were insulted by the runners in the most vile manner; the police captain was at a loss and could only suggest that we too be deputized. In this new capacity we brought about the arrests of several transgressors of the above-mentioned ordinance, and this had the desired effect.
Each day, however, we were unpleasantly reminded that our effectiveness would have to remain one-sided and insufficient as long as we did not have access to financial resources. Many families arriving from New York had been forced to ask for advances in Castle Garden using their baggage as collateral, and they subsequently pestered us with requests to retrieve their baggage for them. But this could only be done by paying the freight and the outstanding debt in New York. Similarly, there were people who were still in possession of their baggage and wanted to continue on their way but had no more money to do so; many of them wanted to deposit their bags with us instead of with an immigrant innkeeper. Our means were unfortunately insufficient to aid each person in this manner, and it is possible that this led to frequent and considerable losses at the hands of the innkeepers. …
As mentioned above, since last summer, together with the agent, I have taken over the surveillance of the train stations to see that the city ordinances are being enforced. But even if they had sufficient time, two officials would still be too few. I would therefore recommend that the president and agent be assigned to a committee of six to be elected for this purpose and to be called the Train Station Surveillance Committee.
These officials would likewise have to have police authorization. Their duty would not only entail being frequently present at the arrival of immigrant trains, but also at their departure. Here they would ask their departing countrymen whether they were satisfied with the food, living conditions, and treatment at the inn where they stayed; in the case of complaints or accusations, the officials would either take notes or detain the people until the case could be looked into by the proper legal authorities.
After having collected information of this kind for a few months, this committee would be in a position to draw up a list of those immigrant inns which are of good repute in our city. This list would then be sent to those German Societies in eastern port cities which could best make use of it. On the other hand, it would also be the duty of this committee to present the mayor with a list of those inns which have proven detrimental to the interests of immigrants, and to petition for the revocation of their licenses. Here, too, the character of our highest municipal authorities guarantees us the necessary support. …
Last winter some honest, upright craftsmen and their families, who were reluctant to ask strangers for help, were forced to bring beds, clothes, and household goods to the pawnbroker. For many, the payment or foreclosure date is at the door, and most of them still have neither work to earn the money nor friends from whom to borrow it. Several such families have turned to me in the past few days to advance them the interest for one or two months in order to put off the due date. They all hope to thus redeem their hard-earned possessions. I would like to recommend lending good families the interest needed to prolong foreclosure, while holding their pawn tickets as security. …
I still hear it said that the agent’s wages are too high and that he has too little to do, that people would of course like to support the society, but that they don’t want their entire contribution going to the preservation of the agent.
I am convinced that these people have not gone to the trouble to investigate what they maintain, and if they had, they would have found that the activities of this official fulfill the most important objectives of the German Society as it has existed to date. These people have not been to the society’s office, they haven’t seen the throngs—often uninterrupted—of people coming and going. The one asks the agent to find relatives or friends, the agent sees to the relevant notice in the newspapers; the other has lost his baggage on the way from New York to Chicago, the agent writes off to Detroit and Dunkirk; a third would like to send money—safely and without cost—to a relative living somewhere or other, the agent takes care of this, too. Now immigrants come who want advances against their baggage so they can continue their trip; the agent accompanies them to the train station or to the inn, estimates the value of the baggage, pays the advances and has the things brought back to the office. On the way he picks up five letters, all addressed to the same person. The first is not very flattering; “Mr. Agent, I’ve been waiting so long for my two suitcases, and you said you would see to them immediately. Send the checks back to me so I’ll know what’s going on!” The good man is of the opinion that the lost things must still be where he last saw them on his trip. His bags, in the meantime, were either pilfered by corrupt railroad officials or have been sent on a grand tour without their owner, but the latter suspects the agent of negligence or even deceit. Next comes an entire family of immigrants, freshly arrived. They have lost one of their suitcases in the train station or have been cheated by an innkeeper; the agent goes along with them so that they, too, will be content. A local citizen wants to bring over a relative from his hometown in Germany. He requests a travel guide with exact directions for getting from his hometown to Chicago, as well as sure means of alerting the cousin of swindlers along the way; the agent, to the best of his ability, also tries to satisfy this request. News is received from an immigrant inn that the proprietor wants to throw out a sick immigrant. The agent goes to see the sick person, gets medical assistance, calms the innkeeper or sees to it that the sick person is brought to a hospital. The agent is once again busy trying to finish a letter to somewhere or other when a man comes in and interrupts him with the words: “Listen, the guy you sent me last time was even worse than the others. I told him to go to the devil! Do you have anyone good today?” Two years ago this same man with the charming manners—always on the lookout for slave labor—was a duespaying member of the German Society; now, however, he’ll not hear of supporting the society because he had the misfortune of having been dissatisfied with the workers referred to him free of charge.
But what the agent has to suffer when he has evoked the righteous anger of a patroness by having secured her a good-for-nothing maid—it would be better if he told you himself. No one, in any case, would envy him this pleasure.
I will not tax your patience any longer. But I would again like to strongly recommend that each member try to introduce at least one of his friends to the society; membership is so easily acquired, as the minimum annual contribution is only $1, and from then on up, absolutely no limits are imposed on generosity.
Spies, one of the Haymarket anarchists hung in 1887, was born in Landeckerberg, Germany, in 1855. Although his autobiography deals mostly with his experiences leading up to and during his trial, in this section he discusses his migration to the United States and his early labor and radical activities.
I was educated for a career in the government service (forest branch). As a child I had private tutors and later visited the Polytechnicum (and “Forest academy”). At the age of seventeen my father died suddenly, leaving a large family in moderate circumstances. As I was the eldest one I did not feel justified in continuing my studies, they were expensive, and concluded to go to America, where I had and have now a number of well-to-do relatives. I arrived in New York in 1872 and upon the advise of my friends learned the Furniture Business. The following year I came to Chicago, where I have resided ever since; though I may add that I have been away from the city occasionally for some time. Once, with the intention of settling in the country, I worked on a farm for a year. But seeing that the small farmers and renters were in a worse plight even than the city wage-workers, and that they were equally dependent, I returned to the city. I have also traveled over the southern states to get acquainted with the country and people, and at another time I joined an exploring expedition through upper Canada, which failed.
When I arrived in this country I knew nothing of socialism, except what I had seen in the newspapers—the “public teachers”(?). And from what I’d read I concluded that the socialists were a lot of ignorant and lazy vagabonds “who wanted to divide up everything.” Having come but very little in contact with people who earned their living by honest labor in the old country, I was amazed and was shocked when I became acquainted with the condition of the wage-workers in the New World.
The factory: the ignominious regulations, the surveillance, the spy system, the servility and lack of manhood among the workers and the arrogant arbitrary behavior of the boss and mamelukes—all this made an impression upon me that I have never been able to divest myself of. At first I could not understand why the workers, among them many old men with bent backs, silently and without a sign of protest bore every insult the caprice of the foreman or boss would heap upon them. I was not then aware of the fact that the opportunity to work was a privilege, a favor, and that it was in the power of those who were in the possession of the factories and instruments of labor to deny or grant this privilege. I did not then understand how difficult it was to find a purchaser for one’s labor, I did not know then that there were thousands and thousands of idle human bodies in the market, ready to hire out upon most any conditions, actually begging for employment. I became conscious of this, very soon, however, and I knew then why these people were so servile, whey suffered the humiliating dictates and capricious whims of their employers. … Personally I had no great difficulty in “getting along.” I had so many advantages over my co-workers. I would most likely have succeeded in becoming a “respectable business man” myself, if I had been possessed of that unscrupulous egotism which characterizes the “successful business man,” and if my aspirations had been that of the avaricious Hamster (the latter belongs to the family of rats and his “pursuit in life” is to steal and accumulate; in some of their depositories the contents of whole granaries have often been found; their greatest delight seems to be possession, for they steal a great deal more than they can consume; in fact they steal, like most of our respectable citizens, regardless of their capacity of consumption).
My philosophy has always been that the object of life can only consist in the enjoyment of life; and that the rational application of this principle is true morality. I held that asceticism as taught by the church was a crime against nature.
Now observing that the vast mass of the people were wasting their lives in Drudgery, accompanied with want and misery, it was but natural for me to inquire into the causes (I had up to that time never read a book or even an impartial essay on modern Socialism). Was this self-abnegation, this self-crucifixion of the people voluntary, or was it forced upon them, and if so—by whom?
About this time while looking over my books in search of something, my attention was attracted by this passage from Aristotle: “… When (at some future age) every tool upon command or by predestination will perform its work, as the artworks of Daedalus did, who moved by themselves, or like the three feet of Hephaestos, who went to their sacred work spontaneously, when thus the weaver shuttle will weave by themselves, then we will no longer require masters and slaves.” (Philosophy of Aristotle)
Had this time, long ago anticipated by the great thinker, not come? Yes, it had. There were the machines … but master and slave still existed. The question arose in my mind—is their existence still necessary?
Antiporas, a Greek poet, who lived at the time of Cicero, had in a like manner greeted the invention of the watermill (water power) as the emancipator of the male and female slaves.—“Oh, these Heathens!”—writes Karl Marx after quoting the above. “They knew nothing of “Political Economy” and Christendom! They failed to conceive how nicely the machines could be employed to lengthen the hours of toil and to intensify the burdens of the slaves. They (the heathens) excused the slavery of one on the ground that it would afford the opportunity of human development to another. But to preach the slavery of the masses in order that a few rude and arrogant parvenus might become “eminent spinners,” “extensive sausage makers” and “influential shoe black dealers”—to do this they lacked that specific Christian organ.”
I think it was in 1875, at the time the “Workingmen’s Party of Illinois” was organized, when, upon the invitation of a friend, I visited the first meeting in which a lecture on Socialism was delivered. Viewed from a rhetorical standpoint this lecture, delivered by a young mechanic, was not very impressive, but the substance … I will simply say that this gave me the passeparout to the many interrogation marks which had worried me for a number of years.
I procured every piece of literature I could get on the subject; whether it was adverse or friendly to Socialism made no difference. In the beginning I was a visionary, an enthusiast. I believed as so many righteous people do to-day that the truth only required to be expressed, the argument only to be made to inlist every good man and woman in the good cause, in the cause of humanity. In my youthful enthusiasm I forgot to apply the experience of historical progress to this particular case. But to my great sorrow, I soon became convinced that the great bulk of humanity were automatons incapable of thinking and reasoning, altogether unconscious of themselves, simply tools of custom.
Then from the sordid is man made,
Usage and custom he doth call his nurse—[Goethe]
But nothing could discourage me. The study of French, German and English economists and social scientists soon made me view things differently than I had seen them in my first enthusiasm. Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” Karl Marx “Kapital” and Morgan’s “Ancient History” have probably had the greatest influence over me of any. I now became an attentive observer of the various social phenomena myself. The last ten years have been very favorable for such investigation as I sought. I found my favorite teachers corroborated everywhere. …
I think it was in 1877 when I first became a member of the Socialistic Labor Party. The events of that year, the brute force with which the whining and confiding wage-slaves were met on all sides impressed upon me the necessity of like resistance. The latter required organization. Shortly afterwards I joined the “Lehr & Wehr Verein,” an armed organization of the workingmen, numbering then about 1500 well drilled members. As soon as our Patricians saw that the canaille was arming for defense—to repel such scandalous attacks in the future as had been made upon them in 1877,—they at once commanded their law agents in Springfield to prohibit workingmen from bearing arms. The command was obeyed. …
The workingmen also went into politics, independent politics—I served as a nominal candidate myself several times—, but when the noble patricians and the political augurs saw that they were successful in electing a number of their candidates, a conspiracy was organized to disfranchise them by fraudulent count and like methods. They workingmen thereupon left the ballot with disgust. …
Himself of Irish descent, John O’Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” in this article—a catch phrase used to rationalize American expansion and conquest of supposedly inferior races. Though he hails Anglo-Saxonism in this article, O’Sullivan and other Irish immigrant social and political critics remained extremely wary of Anglo-Saxon attitudes toward them.
JULY, 1845
Annexation
Texas is now ours. Already, before these words are written, her Convention has undoubtedly ratified the acceptance, by her Congress, of our proffered invitation into the Union; and made the requisite changes in her already republican form of constitution to adapt it to its future federal relations. Her star and her stripe may already be said to have taken their place in the glorious blazon of our common nationality; and the sweep of our eagle’s wing already includes within its circuit the wide extent of her fair and fertile land. …
Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. …
It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretence that the Annexation has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous—of military conquest under forms of peace and law—of territorial aggrandizement at the expense of justice, and justice due by a double sanctity to the weak. This view of the question is wholly unfounded, and has been before so amply refuted in these pages, as well as in a thousand other modes, that we shall not again dwell upon it. The independence of Texas was complete and absolute. It was an independence, not only in fact, but of right No obligation of duty towards Mexico tended in the least degree to restrain our right to effect the desired recovery of the fair province once our own—whatever motives of policy might have prompted a more deferential consideration of her feelings and her pride, as involved in the question. If Texas became peopled with an American population, it was by no contrivance of our government, but on the express invitation of that of Mexico herself; accompanied with such guaranties of State independence, and the maintenance of a federal system analogous to our own, as constituted a compact fully justifying the strongest measures of redress on the part of those afterwards deceived in this guaranty, and sought to be enslaved under the yoke imposed by its violation. She was released, rightfully and absolutely released, from all Mexican allegiance, or duty of cohesion to the Mexican political body, by the acts and fault of Mexico herself, and Mexico alone. There never was a clearer case. It was not revolution; it was resistance to revolution: and resistance under such circumstances as left independence the necessary resulting state, caused by the abandonment of those with whom her former federal association had existed. What then can be more preposterous than all this clamor by Mexico and the Mexican interest, against Annexation, as a violation of any rights of hers, any duties of ours? …
Nor is there any just foundation for the charge that Annexation is a great pro-slavery measure—calculated to increase and perpetuate that institution. Slavery had nothing to do with it. Opinions were and are greatly divided, both at the North and South, as to the influence to be exerted by it on Slavery and the Slave States. That it will tend to facilitate and hasten the disappearance of Slavery from all the northern tier of the present Slave States, cannot surely admit of serious question. The greater value in Texas of the slave labor now employed in those States, must soon produce the effect of draining off that labor southwardly, by the same unvarying law that bids water descend the slope that invites it. Every new Slave State in Texas will make at least one Free State from among those in which that institution now exists—to say nothing of those portions of Texas on which slavery cannot spring and grow—to say nothing of the far more rapid growth of new States in the free West and North-west, as these fine regions are overspread by the emigration fast flowing over them from Europe, as well as from the Northern and Eastern States of the Union as it exists. On the other hand, it is undeniably much gained for the cause of the eventual voluntary abolition of slavery, that it should have been thus drained off towards the only outlet which appeared to furnish much probability of the ultimate disappearance of the negro race from our borders. The Spanish-Indian-American populations of Mexico, Centra America and South America, afford the only receptacle capable of absorbing that race whenever we shall be prepared to slough it off—to emancipate it from slavery, and (simultaneously necessary) to remove it from the midst of our own. Themselves already of mixed and confused blood, and free from the “prejudices” which among us so insuperably forbid the social amalgamation which can alone elevate the Negro race out of a virtually servile degradation, even though legally free, the regions occupied by those populations must strongly attract the black race in that direction; and as soon as the destined hour of emancipation shall arrive, will relieve the question of one of its worst difficulties, if not absolutely the greatest. …
Texas has been absorbed into the Union in the inevitable fulfilment of the general law which is rolling our population westward; the connexion of which with that ratio of growth in population which is destined within a hundred years to swell our numbers to the enormous population of two hundred and fifty millions (if not more), is too evident to leave us in doubt of the manifest design of Providence in regard to the occupation of this continent. It was disintegrated from Mexico in the natural course of events, by a process perfectly legitimate on its own part, blameless on ours; and in which all the censures due to wrong, perfidy and folly, rest on Mexico alone. And possessed as it was by a population which was in truth but a colonial detachment from our own, and which was still bound by myriad ties of the very heart-strings to its old relations, domestic and political, their incorporation into the Union was not only inevitable, but the most natural, right and proper thing in the world—and it is only astonishing that there should be any among ourselves to say it nay. …
California will, probably, next fall away from the loose adhesion which, in such a country as Mexico, holds a remote province in a slight equivocal kind of dependence on the metropolis. Imbecile and distracted, Mexico never can exert any real governmental authority over such a country. The impotence of the one and the distance of the other, must make the relation one of virtual independence; unless, by stunting the province of all natural growth, and forbidding that immigration which can alone develop its capabilities and fulfill the purposes of its creation, tyranny may retain a military dominion, which is no government in the legitimate sense of the term. In the case of California this is now impossible. The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meetinghouses. A population will soon be in actual occupation of California, over which it will be idle for Mexico to dream of dominion. They will necessarily become independent. All this without agency of our government, without responsibility of our people—in the natural flow of events, the spontaneous working of principles, and the adaptation of the tendencies and wants of the human race to the elemental circumstances in the midst of which they find themselves placed. And they will have a right to independence—to self-government—to the possession of the homes conquered from the wilderness by their own labors and dangers, sufferings and sacrifices—a better and a truer right than the artificial title of sovereignty in Mexico, a thousand miles distant, inheriting from Spain a title good only against those who have none better. Their right to independence will be the natural right of self-government belonging to any community strong enough to maintain it—distinct in position, origin and character, and free from any mutual obligations of membership of a common political body, binding it to others by the duty of loyalty and compact of public faith. This will be their title to independence; and by this title, there can be no doubt that the population now fast streaming down upon California will both assert and maintain that independence. Whether they will then attach themselves to our Union or not, is not to be predicted with any certainty. Unless the projected railroad across the continent to the Pacific be carried into effect, perhaps they may not; though even in that case, the day is not distant when the Empires of the Atlantic and Pacific would again flow together into one, as soon as their inland border should approach each other. But that great work, colossal as appears the plan on its first suggestion, cannot remain long unbuilt Its necessity for this very purpose of binding and holding together in its iron clasp our fast-settling Pacific region with that of the Mississippi valley—the natural facility of the route—the ease with which any amount of labor for the construction can be drawn in from the overcrowded populations of Europe, to be paid in the lands made valuable by the progress of the work itself—and its immense utility to the commerce of the world with the whole eastern coast of Asia, alone almost sufficient for the support of such a road—these considerations give assurance that the day cannot be distant which shall witness the conveyance of the representatives from Oregon and California to Washington within less time than a few years ago was devoted to a similar journey by those from Ohio;. …
Away, then, with all idle French talk of balances of power on the American Continent. There is no growth in Spanish America! Whatever progress of population there may be in the British Canadas, is only for their own early severance of their present colonial relation to the little island three thousand miles across the Atlantic; soon to be followed by Annexation, and destined to swell the still accumulating momentum of our progress. And whosoever may hold the balance, though they should cast into the opposite scale all the bayonets and cannon, not only of France and England, but of Europe entire, how would it kick the beam against the simple, solid weight of the two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions—destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!
Over the course of her life, Mary Anne Sadlier, an Irish immigrant, published sixty works of poetry and fiction documenting, among other things, the Famine, migration to the United States, and migration west across this continent. In this passage from Bessy Conway or, The Irish Girl in America, the tale of an Irish immigrant domestic, published in 1861, Bessy warns of the perils that potentially await the Irish immigrant woman.
“Well! I’m not over fond of giving advice,” said Bessy, “but as you asked my opinion I’ll give it, and then you can’t blame me one way or the other. America is a bad place for young girls to go to, unless they have their father, or brothers, or somebody to look after them.”
“Humph! who had you to look after yon?”
“Not one but myself and God’s good Providence.”
“Well! an’ wouldn’t our girls have the same?” asked the dame sharply.
“I’m not speaking of them, at all,” said Bessy, “but I tell you, Mrs. O’Hare, there’s many a girl that had as good a mother as ever you were … and I’m not saying but you’re good enough … that leaves home a simple country girl with the fear of God in her heart, and the blush of modesty on her cheek, that turns out very bad and very indifferent in America. If they keep in the state of grace, and go regularly to their duty they’re all right, and sure, thanks be to God! there’s thousands of them that do, and signs on them and their friends at home … but there’s just as many … perhaps more … that falls in with Protestants and Jews, and everything that way, and in the course of a lithe time forget themselves altogether … at least they forget that they have a soul to be saved, or a God to judge them. Dress and finery, and balls and dances is all the God they have then, and you may guess it’s not a good end they make of it either for body or soul.”
“Well, now, that’s curious,” put in another neighbor, “an’ we hearin’ such a different account of it from every one else. Why, there’s Jemmy McBride’s daughter from beyond the river that got a great match in New York or Philadelphy or some of them place … they say she doesn’t know the end of her own riches.”
Bessy laughed in her own quiet way. “God help your wit, Mrs. Shanaghan! it’s little you know here about those great matches.
Now I happen to know something about Ann McBride, for though I never saw her in America, I know them that did, and lived with her, too; she is married to a man in New York that’s pretty well off … I think he’s in the grocery business … she lives in a fine house and has very nice furniture and all that, and dresses in the very height of the fashion, but her husband is a Protestant … a sort of a one … and poor Ann is … nothing at all. Himself goes to church of an odd time, but Ann never troubles church or chapel. I was told by a girl that lived with her that when she caught her one night teaching her children their prayers … Catholic prayers, of course … she was very angry, and told her not to be bothering their brains with them old prayers, they’d have time enough to learn them.’”
Various exclamations of horror and indignation testified the feelings of the listeners Some of them, however, were a little skeptical on the subject.
“Why, then, Bessy ! it’s hard to think that girls brought up Catholics could ever come to that!”
“Well! hard or easy, I tell you it’s true,” said Bessy.
“There’s thousands of Irish girls in New York (of course that’s the city I know best) that are as good Catholics as any of their people at home, but there’s just as many the other way. What would you think of an Irish girl that would tell you she was seven years in America, and had never been to Communion in all that time … maybe once or twice to confession?”
“Lord save us, Bessy!” her mother exclaimed, “you’re enough to frighten one!”
“I know that, mother, but I’m only telling the truth, and God knows! my heart bleeds to tell it. I knew girls myself that were just as I say, some of them that would laugh at you if you spoke to them of saying their prayers morning or night, and would never think of crossing a Church door if somebody didn’t make them go. That all comes, as I told you, of their going out alone to America, without any one to advise or direct them, and them falling into bad places at the very first. Take my advice, Mrs. O’Hare, and keep your girls at home … if yon can live here, so can they, and you’ll find it better in the long run.”
“Well I believe you’re about right, Bessy!” replied Mrs. O’Hare; “it’s best keep them under our own eyes. Good night, and God be with you all.” The visitors then retired, wondering much at what they had heard.
In these sections of his book on Irish immigrant life in the United States, written in 1868, John Maguire discusses the motivations of the nativist anti-Irish Catholic Know Nothings, as well as the complexities that the Civil War posed for Irish immigrants.
Source: John Francis Maguire. The Irish in America (1868; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), pp. 444, 445, 446, 447–448, 449–450, 452–453, 545–547; © 1969 by Arno Press, Inc.
The Know Nothing movement of 1854 and 1855 troubled the peace of Catholics, and filled the hearts of foreign-born American citizens with sorrow and indignation. They were made the victims of rampant bigotry and furious political partisanship. There was nothing new in this Know Nothingism. It was as old as the time of the Revolution, being Native Americanism under another name. Its animating spirit was hostility to the stranger—insane jealousy of the foreigner. It manifested itself in the Convention which formed the Constitution of the United States, though the right to frame that Constitution had been largely gained through the valour of adopted citizens, born in foreign countries, and through the aid and assistance of a foreign nation. It manifested itself in the year 1796, in laws passed during the Administration of President Adams, a narrow-minded man, much prejudiced against foreigners.
Remembering the history of the last fifty years, during which thousands, hundreds of thousands, nay millions of the population of Europe have been spreading themselves over the vast American continent, building up its cities, penetrating and subduing its forests, reclaiming its wastes, constructing its great works, developing its resources, multiplying its population—in a word, making America what she is at this day—one does not know whether to laugh at the absurdity of those who imagined that, without injury to the future of the States, they might bar their ports to emigrants from foreign countries;
This hostility to the foreigner, intensified by religious prejudice, exhibited itself on various occasions–notably in the disgraceful riots of 1844; but on no occasion was the feeling so universal, or its display so marked, as in the years 1854 and 1855, when the banner of Know Nothingism was made the symbol of political supremacy. Here was every element necessary to a fierce and relentless strife. The Constitution of Know Nothingism was anomalously adopted on the 17th of June, 1854, the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker’s Hill. Strange, that a day sacred to the freedom of America should be that on which citizens of a free Republic should plot in the dark against the liberties of their fellow men! But so it was. …
Many who joined this organisation had not the excuse, the bad excuse, of fanaticism for their conduct. Lust of power was their ruling passion; to trample their opponents under foot, and secure everything to themselves, their animating motive. If they could have attained their ends through the Catholic body, they would have employed every art of wile and seduction in the hope of securing their co-operation; but as they deemed it more to their advantage to assail and blacken the Catholics, they accordingly did assail and blacken them to the satisfaction of their dupes. For religion—any form of religion—they did not care a cent; probably they regarded it as so much venerable superstition and priestcraft—a very excellent thing for women and persons of weak mind, but not for men ; at any rate, men of their enlightenment. Members of no congregation, these defenders of the faith never “darkened the door” of a church or meeting-house, and save, like the sailor who did not know of what religion he was, but was “d—d sure he was not a Papist,” entertaining a blind prejudice against Catholicity, they were as ignorant of Christian belief as any savage of Central Africa. …
It is impossible to describe the frenzy that seemed to possess a certain portion of the American people, whose strongest passions and most cherished prejudices were stimulated by appeals from the press and the platform, the pulpit and the street tub. It seized on communities and individuals as a species of uncontrollable insanity. Bitten by the madness of the moment, acquaintance turned savagely on acquaintance, friend upon friend, even relative upon relative. The kindly feelings which it took years to cement were rudely torn asunder and trampled under foot. The Irish Catholic was the chief object of attack. He was guilty of the double crime of being an Irishman and a Catholic; and, to do him justice, he was as ready to proclaim his faith as to boast of his nativity. His enemies were many, his friends few, his defenders less. Poor Pat had indeed a sad time of it. …
Like fever or cholera, this politicoreligious epidemic was milder or more virulent in one place than in another. Here it seized hold of the entire community; there it caught but a few individuals. Here it signalised its presence by riots; there by bloodshed. In this city its congenial result was a burning, or a cowardly assassination; in the other, a stand-up fight, in which the Irish Catholic had to encounter enormous odds against him. That comparatively little mischief was done to ecclesiastical property may be accounted for by the manner with which, as by one impulse, the Catholics rallied round churches and convents wherever there was a probability of their being assailed. In New York, Know Nothingism made little external display in mischief and outrage; which fact may be accounted for in two ways—the one, that the Irish population had by this time grown too powerful to be wantonly trifled with; the other, that they listened in an obedient spirit to the advice of the Archbishop, who wisely believed that the madness would speedily die out if left to itself, and if not stimulated by opposition; that it was something similar to a conflagration of flax, violent for the moment, but without any enduring power. The Archbishop was right in his judgment. It was a frenzy of the hour, artfully inflamed by angry sects, and skilfully directed by unscrupulous politicians—men who would stop at nothing which could in any way further the objects of their selfish ambition. The fury of the madness did die out; but the feelings to which it gave rise, or evoked into new life, did not so readily pass away. …
From the very circumstances of their position, it was almost a matter of inevitable necessity that the Irish citizens of America should ally themselves with that political party which, with respect to the foreigner and the stranger, adopted the liberal and enlightened policy of Jefferson and Madison. The Irish, then, being Democrats, naturally sympathised with the prevailing sentiment of the Southern States, which was strongly Democratic. And yet, notwithstanding this sympathy, the result of a general concurrence of opinion with that of the South, the Irish of the Northern States not merely remained faithful to the flag of the Union, but were amongst the foremost and the most enthusiastic of those who rallied in its defence, and the most steadfast in their support of the Federal cause, from the moment that the first gun, fired in Charleston Harbour, echoed through the land, to the hour when Lee surrendered, and the war was at an end. Whatever their opinions or feelings as to the conduct of those who, justly or unjustly, were held responsible for bringing about or precipitating the contest, and deeply as they felt the injury which war was certain to inflict on the country of their adoption, the Irish-born citizens never wavered in their duty. None more bitterly deplored than they did the sad consequences of civil strife—a conflict which would bring into deadly collision kindred races even of their own people; but once the rupture was irrevocable, they calmly accepted their position. From the first moment to the last, they were animated by a high sense of duty, and an earnest feeling of patriotism. Fortunately for the honour and fame of the Irish. there was in their motives an utter absence of the baneful passions of hatred and revenge, or the least desire to crush or humiliate their opponents. War with all its tremendous consequences they faced as a stern and terrible necessity; but they entered into it with a chivalrous and Christian spirit, which never deserted them throughout the prolonged struggle. They did not stop to argue or split hairs as to the constitutional rights alleged to lie involved; they acted, as they felt, with the community amid whom they lived, and with whom their fortunes were identified. The feeling was the same at both sides of the line. The Irish in the South stood with the State to which, as they believed, they owed their first allegiance, and, as was the case in the North, they caught the spirit of the community of whom they formed part. They also were profoundly grieved at the necessity for war, and would have gladly avoided the calamity of an open rupture. Southern Irishmen have told me that they shed tears of bitter anguish when, in vindication of what they held to be the outraged independence of their State, which to them was the immediate home of their adoption, they first fired on the flag of that glorious country which had been an asylum to millions of their people. The Northern Irishman went into the war for the preservation of the Union—the Southern Irishman for the independence of his State. And each, in his own mind, was as thoroughly justified, both as to right and duty, principle and patriotism, as the other. With the political or constitutional question involved at either side I have no business whatever; and were I competent to disentangle it from the maze into which conflicting opinions and subtle disquisitions have brought it, I should still, from a feeling of delicacy, decline dealing with a subject which may not, as yet, be freely handled without exciting anger and irritation. I have heard the undisguised sentiments of Irishmen at both sides of the line—every man of them loving America with a feeling of profound attachment; and I, who stand, as it were, on neutral ground, have as full faith in the patriotism and purity of motive of the Northern as the Southern, the Confederate as the Federal.
Irish-born Dennis Kearney formed the Workingmen’s Party in California in 1877 at the age of twenty-three. In this document and in many others, Kearney combined attacks on the wealthy elite of the United States with assaults on Chinese immigrants. If on the East Coast Irish immigrant racial identity was routinely challenged, on the West Coast Irish immigrants could align themselves with other whites to oppose nonwhite immigration.
Our moneyed men have ruled us for the past thirty years. Under the flag of the slaveholder they hoped to destroy our liberty. Failing in that, they have rallied under the banner of the millionaire, the banker and the land monopolist, the railroad king and the false politician, to effect their purpose. We have permitted them to become immensely rich against all sound republican policy, and they have turned upon us to sting us to death. They have seized upon the government by bribery and corruption. They have made speculation and public robbery a science. They have loaded the nation, the state, the county, and the city with debt. They have stolen the public lands. They have grasped all to themselves, and by their unprincipled greed brought a crisis of unparalleled distress on forty millions of people, who have natural resources to feed, clothe and shelter the whole human race.
Such misgovernment, such mismanagement, may challenge the whole world for intense stupidity, and would put to shame the darkest tyranny of the barbarous past. We, here in California, feel it as well as you. We feel that the day and hour has come for the Workingmen of America to depose capital and put Labor in the Presidential chair, in the Senate and Congress, in the State House, and on the Judicial Bench. We are with you in this work. Workingmen must form a party of their own, take charge of the government, dispose gilded fraud, and put honest toil in power.
In our golden state all these evils have been intensified. Land monopoly has seized upon all the best soil in this fair land. A few men own from ten thousand to two hundred thousand acres each. The poor Laborer can find no resting place, save on the barren mountain, or in the trackless desert. Money monopoly has reached its grandest proportions. Here, in San Francisco, the palace of the millionaire looms up above the hovel of the starving poor with as wide a contrast as anywhere on earth. To add to our misery and despair, a bloated aristocracy has sent to China—the greatest and oldest despotism in the world—for a cheap working slave. It rakes the slums of Asia to find the meanest slave on earth—the Chinese coolie—and imports him here to meet the free American in the Labor market, and still further widen the breach between the rich and the poor, still further to degrade white Labor. These cheap slaves fill every place. Their dress is scant and cheap. Their food is rice from China. They hedge twenty in a room, ten by ten. They are wipped curs, abject in docility, mean, contemptible and obedient in all things. They have no wives, children or dependents.
They are imported by companies, controlled as serfs, worked like slaves, and at last go back to China with all their earnings. They are in every place, they seem to have no sex. Boys work, girls work; it is all alike to them. The father of a family is met by them at every turn. Would he get work for himself? Ah! A stout Chinaman does it cheaper. Will he get a place for his oldest boy? He can not. His girl? Why, the Chinaman is in her place too! Every door is closed. He can only go to crime or suicide, his wife and daughter to prostitution, and his boys to hoodlumism and the penitentiary.
Do not believe those who call us savages, rioters, incendiaries, and outlaws. We seek our ends calmly, rationally, at the ballot box. So far good order has marked all our proceedings. But, we know how false, how inhuman, our adversaries are. We know that if gold, if fraud, if force can defeat us, they will all be used. And we have resolved that they shall not defeat us. We shall arm. We shall meet fraud and falsehood with defiance, and force with force, if need be. We are men, and propose to live like men in this free land, without the contamination of slave labor, or die like men, if need be, in asserting the rights of our race, our country, and our families.
California must be all American or all Chinese. We are resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so. May we not rely upon your sympathy and assistance?
With great respect for the Workingmen’s
Party of California.
Dennis Kearney, President
H. L. Knight, Secretary
This “Chinese Police Tax,” passed in 1862, continued the efforts of California legislators to keep Chinese immigrants out of the mines, and to prevent them from competing with white-owned businesses.
The People of the State of California, represented in Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows:
SECTION 1. There is hereby levied on each person, male and female, of the Mongolian race, of the age of eighteen years and upwards, residing in this State, except such as shall, under laws now existing, or which may hereafter be enacted, take out licenses to work in the mines, or to prosecute some kind of business, a monthly capitation tax of two dollars and fifty cents, which tax shall be known as the Chinese Police Tax; provided, That all Mongolians exclusively engaged in the production and manufacture of the following articles shall be exempt from the provisions of this Act, viz: sugar, rice, coffee, tea. …
SECTION 4. The Collector shall collect the Chinese police tax, provided for in this Act, from all person refusing to pay such tax, and sell the same at public auction, by giving notice by proclamation one hour previous to such sale; and shall deliver the property, together with a bill of sale thereof, to the person agreeing to pay, and paying, the highest thereof, which delivery and bill of sale shall transfer to such person a good and sufficient title to the property. And after deducing the tax and necessary expenses incurred by reason of such refusal, seizure, and sale of property, the Collector shall return the surplus of the proceeds of the sale, if any, to the person whose property was sold; provided, That should any person, liable to pay the tax imposed in this Act, in any county in this State, escape into any other County, with the intention to evade the payment of such tax, then, and in that event, it shall be lawful for the Collector, when he shall collect Chinese police taxes, as provided for in this section, shall deliver to each of the persons paying such taxes a police tax receipt, with the blanks properly filled; provided, further, That any Mongolian, or Mongolians, may pay the above named tax to the County Treasurer, who is hereby authorized to receipt for the same in the same manner as the Collector. And any Mongolian, so paying said tax to the Treasurer of the County, if paid monthly, shall be entitled to a reduction of twenty percent of said tax. And if paid in advance for the year next ensuing, such Mongolian, or Mongolians, shall be entitled to a reduction of thirty-three and one third percent on said tax. But in all cases where the County Treasurer receipts for said tax yearly in advance, he shall do it by issuing for each month separately; and any Mongolian who shall exhibit a County Treasurer’s receipt, as above provided, to the Collector for the month for which said receipt was given.
SECTION 5. Any person charged with the collection of Chinese police taxes, who shall give any receipt other than the one prescribed in this Act, or receive money for such taxes without giving the necessary receipt therefor, or who shall insert more than one name in any receipt, shall be guilty of a felony, and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined in a sum not exceeding one thousand dollars, and be imprisoned in the State Prison for a period not exceeding one year.
SECTION 6. Any Tax Collector who shall sell, or cause to be sold, any police tax receipt, with the date of the sale left blank, or which shall not be dated and signed, and blanks filled with ink, by the Controller, Auditor, and Tax Collector, and any person who shall make any alteration, or cause the same to be made, in any police tax receipt, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be fined in a sum not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisoned in the State prison for a period not exceeding 2 years; and the police tax receipt so sold, with blank date, or which shall not be signed and dated, and blanks filled with ink, as aforesaid, or which shall have been altered, shall be received in evidence in any Court of competent jurisdiction.
SECTION 7. Any person or company who shall hire persons liable to pay the Chinese police tax shall be held responsible for the payment of the tax due from each person so hired; and no employer shall be released from this liability on the ground that the employee in indebted to him (the employer), and the Collector may proceed against any such employer in the same manner as he might against the original party owing the taxes. The Collector shall have power to require any person or company believed to be indebted to, or to have any money, gold dust, or property of any kind, belonging to any person liable for police taxes, or in which such person is interested, in his or their possession, or under his or their control, to answer, under oath, as to such indebtedness, or the possession of such money, gold dust, or other property. In case a party is indebted, or has possession or control of any moneys, gold dust, or other property, as aforesaid, of such person liable for police taxes, he may collect from such party the amount of such taxes, and may require the delivery of such money, gold dust, or other property, as aforesaid; and in all cases the receipt of the Collector to said party shall be a complete bar to any demand made against said party, or his legal representatives, for the amounts of money, gold dust, or property, embraced therein.
SECTION 8. The Collector shall receive for his service, in collecting police taxes, twenty percent of all moneys which he shall collect from persons owing such taxes. All of the residue, after deducting the percentage of the Collector, forty percent shall be paid into the County Treasury, for the use of the State, forty percent into the general County Fund, for the use of the County, and the remaining twenty percent into the School Fund, for the benefit of schools within the County; provided, That in counties where the Tax Collector receives a specific salary, he shall not be required to pay the percentage allowed for collecting the police tax into the County Treasury, but shall be allowed to retain the same for his own use and benefit; provided, That where he shall collect the police tax by Deputy, the percentage shall go to the Deputy. …
SECTION 10. It is hereby made the duty of the various officers charged with the execution of the provisions of this Act, to carry out said provisions by themselves of Deputies; and for the faithful performance of their said duties in the premises, they shall be liable on their official bonds, respectively. The Treasurer of the respective counties shall make their statements and settlements under this Act with the Controller of State, at the same time and in the same manner they make their settlements under the general Revenue Act.
SECTION 11. This Act shall be take effect and be in force from and after the first day of May, next ensuing.
In this voyeuristic view of the Chinese immigrant community in San Francisco, part of a travel narrative titled A la California: Sketch of Life in the Golden State, Evans describes the sparse population of women among Chinese immigrants, and especially the prostitute population.
Source: Museum of the City of San Francisco, http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/evans.html, pp. 2, 6; Albert S. Evans, A la California: Sketch of Life in the Golden State, with an introduction by Col. W. H. L. Barnes and illustrations from original drawings by Ernest Narjot (San Fransciso: A. L. Bancroft, 1873); © 1995–2001, Gladys Cox Hansen.
You will see coming forth from the various narrow alleys which intersect the main streets, and are known by the expressive designations of “Murderer’s Alley, “China Alley,” “Stout’s Alley,” etc., any number of Chinese females, clad in their loose drawers or pants of blue or black cotton goods, straight-cut sacques of broadcloth, satin, or other costly or cheap material, according to their condition and social rank; shoes of blue satin, richly embroidered with bullion, and with thick soles of white felt and white wood, anklets or bangles, and bracelets of silver, gold, or jade-stone, and lustrous blue-black hair, braided in two strands, hanging down the back from beneath coarse-striped gingham handkerchiefs, thrown over the head, and tied beneath the chin as a badge denoting slavery, and a life of hopeless infamy; or, if the owner happens to be the wife of a laborer, tradesman or gambling-house proprietor, wonderfully gotten up with a species of transparent mucilage, and fashioned into a rudderlike structure sticking out fully a foot behind, supporting a number of skewerlike pins of gold or silver, each six or eight inches in length, and putting to shame by its size and cleanly appearance, the waterfalls of our Caucasian belles—shuffle along in groups of three or four, talking and laughing together like so many little children, or exchanging compliments, which would never bear translation into English, with the male blackguards, loafers and plug-uglies of their race.
These women are intellectually only children, and are more to be pitied and less condemned than the fallen of their sex of any other race. Every second building is occupied as a saloon, in which nobody seems to be stirring, and has a basement, over the door of which is painted the name of the establishment, as “The Roaring Gimlet,” “The Bull’s Run,” “The Cock of the Walk,” “Star of the Union,” “Every Man is Welcome,” etc., etc., but now closed and apparently unoccupied. There are strains of earsplitting music coming occasionally from the Chinese gambling-houses, and from time to time, as you walk along, you see rows of Chinamen seated at low benches in basements, industriously engaged in making up “every choice brand of Havana and Domestic cigars,” as the signs over the doorways inform you.
This is “China Alley,” and is occupied solely by Chinese prostitutes. The houses are all small brick affairs, coming flush up to the edge of the alley, and have windows with wickets in them, made by setting one pane of glass in a frame by itself, and hanging it on hinges. There is a front and a rear room to each of these little dens; and, as we walk along, we can see all the arrangements of the outer rooms Each of these places appear to be inhabited by from two to half a dozen Chinese girls, some of whom are dressed in hoops and long dresses “Melican” style, but for the most part are clad in the costume of their own country.
These poor creatures are all slaves, bought with a price in China, and imported by degraded men of their own race, who, despite our laws, contrive to hold them to a life-long servitude, which is a thousand times more hopeless and terrible than the negro slavery of Louisiana or Cuba could ever be. They have been reared to a life of shame from infancy, and have not a single trace of the native modesty of women left. They are, as we have said, mere children in point of intellect, havIng no education whatever, and no experience of the world outside of the narrow alleys in which they have always lived, and the emigrant ship in which they were brought over to this country. They have their likes and their dislikes, of course, and become attached to each other in a childish way, frequently being seen walking together on the streets, hand in hand, like little Caucasian sisters going home from school. At very long intervals, some of these poor untutored children of the East become imbued with Western notions of liberty and right, and making their escape from the clutches of their masters, become joined in lawful marriage to some laborious washerman, or other countryman, and endeavor to settle down to an honest life; but their chances of escaping kidnapping, and being dragged away to some distant locality, beaten, and reduced again to prostitution and slavery, are very slim indeed. The owner in such cases has always a personal grudge, as well as a pecuniary loss, to urge him on to vindictive measures; and he will willingly spend ten times the value of his escaping chattel to get her back again, and have his revenge. Besides, the safety of this peculiar institution demands that the most rigorous measures should be taken in every case, as an example to deter others from following in the same vicious course.
The girls cost $40 each in Canton, but are valued here at about $400, if passably good-looking, young and healthy, and readily sell at that figure in cash, or approved paper. Each colony of half a dozen girls is under the immediate control of an “old mother,” herself a retired prostitute, who jealously watches over each, and receives from them the wages of their shame as fast as earned. From each wicket all the way down the alley a female head may be seen protruding, and there is a constant fire of jokes and repartee going on between the occupants of the dens on each side of the alley, while every passer comes in for his share of personal notice. A girl, with hair carefully braided and decked with artificial flowers, and cheeks and lips cunningly painted so as to resemble those of her frail Caucasian sisters, notices us looking toward her wicket, and instantly raising her hand, taps at the window, but at the moment catches a glimpse of the policeman behind us, and shuts the wicket, and turns away as if she had not seen us at all. The alarm runs down the whole alley in an instant; there is a rattling of wickets, as if a hurricane was sweeping through the place, and in half a minute all is as silent as the grave, and not a head to be seen. It is a special misdemeanor under our city ordinances for a Chinawoman to tap on a window to attract the attention of anybody on the street; and the girls well know what is in store for them if they are caught at it by the police.
This document makes disparaging comparisons between Chinese immigrants on the one hand, and Irish and German immigrants on the other. Clearly part of the effort to make opposition to Chinese immigration national, it pleads for understanding and support from whites outside of California.
All comparisons between Irish and German immigration and that of the Chinese are unjust. The former make their homes here, buy farms and homesteads, are of the same general race, are buried here after death, and take an interest and aid in all things pertaining to the best interests of the country. The Chinese come for a season only; and, while they give their labor, they do not expend the proceeds of such labor in the country. They do not come to settle or make homes, and not one in fifty of them is married. Their women are all suffering slaves and prostitutes, for which possession murderous feuds and high-handed cruelty are constantly occurring. To compare the Chinese with even the lowest white laborers is, therefore, absurd.
Our best interests are suffering of these Asiatic slaves; we are trying to make them live decently while here, and to discourage their arrival in such numbers as to drive white laborers out of the country. Nineteen persons out of every twenty here desire and intend that all this shall be done peaceably and without oppression; all that is asked is that motives and acts not entertained or practiced shall not be charged against California by those who discuss this question with but a slight knowledge of the facts, and that knowledge distorted and one sided.