Chapter Six
America’s ethnic landscape changed in the first part of the nineteenth century. Native Americans, removed from their traditional homelands, were driven onto reservations in the West. African American slavery expanded in the South. At the same time, a great flow of immigrants from Ireland—more than half of them women—reached American shores.
The Irish newcomers struggled to find their place in a society that was hungry for their labor but treated them with scorn. Along the way, Irish Americans sometimes came into competition or conflict with other ethnic minorities, even though they faced some of the same obstacles.
Beef for Britain
The Irish immigrants thought of themselves as exiles who had been forced to flee from a homeland they loved. Time and again, they complained that they were pushed out of their own country by English oppressors. The large-scale emigration from Ireland in the nineteenth century was deeply rooted in a long history of English oppression.
Beginning in the twelfth century, the English conquest of Ireland caused Irish land to be seized and transferred to colonizers from England. By 1700 the Irish owned only 14 percent of Ireland. Farmers had to rent or lease land from English landowners in order to grow food for their families.
Things got worse in the eighteenth century, when the English landlords decided to make their Irish properties more profitable. Beef was in high demand in Britain, so the landlords began to switch from farming to cattle ranching. Farmers’ fields were fenced off for use as cattle pastures, and peasants were thrown out of their homes. Eventually 90 percent of the laborers who had once been needed to plant and harvest crops found themselves out of work.
Ireland became a land of “extremely poor” tenants, who lived on other people’s land in “dirty Hovels of Mud and Straw, and clothed only in Rags,” according to Benjamin Franklin, who visited in 1771. By the 1830s, Ireland was profiting from the sale of its beef, but the common people had been reduced to wretchedness. Families huddled in huts, sharing a single bed of straw while living on a diet of potatoes.
The Great Famine
There was an alternative to the misery of life in Ireland. By the thousands, Irish people were leaving for America. Letters sent to family and friends back home in Ireland told of the wealth and opportunity available in the United States, where there was no tyranny or oppression from landlords. Between 1815 and 1845, a million Irish came to America.
Still, most Irish hated the thought of leaving Ireland, so they endured their hardships at home. They became migrant workers in their own country, leaving their cottages each spring to seek construction or agricultural work, and then returning to their families in the fall with their rent money sewn inside their clothes. Earnings were meager, but they were enough to rent a small plot of land on which to grow potatoes.
Then in 1845 a little-known fungus appeared and changed the course of Irish history. This blight, or disease, attacked potatoes. Forty percent of the crop rotted in the ground that first year. The deadly blight came back year after year until 1854, destroying the main food source of the Irish peasants. By 1855, a million people had died of starvation and disease in the Great Famine.
For many landlords, the famine was a chance to turn even more of their property into fields for grazing. Peasants who could not pay their rent were turned out of their huts. The landlords kept shipping beef and grain to British markets, while the starving Irish peasants wandered the countryside like “famished and ghastly skeletons” and families ate seaweed in a desperate attempt to stay alive.
In a panic, one and a half million more Irish fled to the United States during the Great Famine. Barely able to scrape together money for their passage, they traveled on crowded ships, crammed together below deck on plywood shelves. Tens of thousands sickened and died during the passage or immediately afterward. Even after the potato blight had retreated, Irish peasants emigrated from their poverty-stricken homeland. Between 1855 and 1900, two million more emigrated to the United States.
An Army of Workers
Pushed from Ireland by famine and hardship, the immigrants were pulled to America by the opportunity for jobs. They provided labor for the grand building projects that were knitting the United States together—its roads, canals, and railroads. Watching these laborers work on the National Road in Pennsylvania, a farmer described them as an “immortal Irish brigade, a thousand strong, with their carts, wheelbarrows, picks, shovels and blasting tools, grading the commons and climbing the mountainside . . . leaving behind them a roadway good enough for an emperor to travel over.”
The Irish helped build the Erie Canal and thousands of miles of railways, but they became disposable workers. They had high accident rates because they were often assigned to do the most hazardous jobs. Irish miners in the Pennsylvania coal mines destroyed their lungs breathing black dust. The many deaths of railroad workers gave rise to a saying: An Irishman is buried under every tie.
America turned out to be a nightmare for many Irish immigrants. They complained of being treated like dogs, or worse, “despised & kicked about.” A song told of their disappointment:
I got a letter from a relation
Telling me to hasten across the sea,
That gold was to be found in plenty there
And that I’d never have a hard day or a poor one again
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Alas, when I landed
I made for the city without delay;
But I never saw gold on the street corners—
Alas, I was a poor aimless person cast adrift.
Against Other Workers
The Irish immigrants found themselves not only exploited as laborers, but also pitted against Chinese and black workers. One clash took place in New England, where Irish workers in the shoemaking industry struggled against low wages. They also opposed the introduction of factory machines that reduced the need for labor.
In order to speak with a united voice, the workers formed a union called the Knights of St. Crispin. The Crispins quickly became the country’s largest labor organization, with fifty thousand members by 1870. Demanding higher pay and a workday of only eight hours, the Crispins, in a factory in North Adams, Massachusetts, went on strike, refusing to work until the factory owner agreed to negotiate with them.
Instead, the owner brought in seventy-five Chinese workers from San Francisco to replace the striking Crispins. The Chinese workers were housed in dormitories inside the locked and guarded factory yard. Within three months they were manufacturing more shoes than the same number of white workers had been producing before the strike, which increased profits for the factory owner. Newspapers hailed the owner’s move as a success.
The factory owner’s action had a sobering effect on workers striking at nearby shoe factories. Ten days after the Chinese workers arrived, the strikers at the other factories, fearful of losing their jobs, went back to work—at a 10 percent pay cut. A magazine suggested that business owners might find Chinese workers to be the solution to the problem of unions and organized labor in the United States. The Chinese were held up as a model for Irish laborers. Chinese workers were said to be harder working and quicker to learn than the Irish.
The Irish immigrant laborers were also believed to be savage and uncivilized, and to lack intelligence and self-control. In a sermon called “The Dangerous Classes in Society,” Reverend Theodore Parker of Boston claimed that some people were “inferior in nature.” These “lower” beings, he said, were “Negroes, Indians, Mexicans, Irish, and the like.”
In Ireland, people had seen parallels between their own lives as “slaves” of the British and the lives of the enslaved and oppressed American blacks. In 1842, for example, thousands of Irish citizens signed an antislavery petition that called blacks their equals and brothers. But when the Irish crossed the Atlantic, they seemed to lose their sympathy for African Americans. In America, many of them became antiblack.
As they competed against blacks for jobs, Irish immigrants called attention to their race. In a “country of the whites,” they asked, shouldn’t white workers be chosen over blacks? Because many white Protestant Americans despised the Irish as Catholics and foreigners, Irish newcomers tried to become insiders, to be accepted as Americans, by showing their fellow whites that they too were hostile to blacks. Identifying African Americans as “the other” was a way for the Irish to assimilate, or blend, into white society.
African Americans reacted to Irish hostility with their own anti-Irish complaints. They resented being told by the Irish to go back to Africa, a place they had never seen. They claimed that the Irish foreigners took jobs from American-born people. Black journalist John E. Bruce wrote, “It is to be regretted that in [America] where the outcasts—the scum of European society—can come and enjoy the fullest social and political privileges, the Native Born American with wooly hair and dark complexion is made the Victim. . . .”
The Irish had felt the sting of English prejudice and oppression in Ireland. In America they often turned their rage against others on the lower ranks of society’s pecking order. Their hostility toward blacks exploded during the Civil War, when Democratic politicians warned that Republicans were willing to sacrifice the lives of Irish soldiers in order to free the slaves, who would then be brought North to “steal the work and the bread of the honest Irish.” Fired up by such fears, Irish rioters turned on blacks in New York City in July 1863. Four days of rioting ended only when an army regiment arrived to restore order. More than a hundred people had been killed.
A Massive Migration of Women
Labor competition between Irish and blacks was fierce in the domestic services. In 1830 the majority of the maids, housecleaners, cooks, and other servants in New York City were black. Twenty years later, Irish women filled the majority of domestic service jobs. The daughters of Irish farmers did not just become maids in America, however. They also became factory workers in textile towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island.
More than half of the Irish immigrants were women. (In contrast, women made up just 21 percent of the immigrants from southern Italy and 4 percent of those from Greece.) This massive flight of women from Ireland meant that by 1867, Irish women outnumbered Irish men in New York City: 117,000 to 87,000.
Irish women left their homeland because economic conditions there hit them especially hard. After about 1815 it became common for farmers to leave their land to just one son, rather than dividing it up among their children. Sons who did not inherit land had little choice except to emigrate. This meant that there were fewer men in Ireland who could afford to get married. Young women found their chances of marriage extremely limited, unless their families could afford dowries, money that would go to their husbands’ families.
Marriage rates declined. So did the market for goods produced by small, cottage-based manufacturing, such as weaving, which had traditionally been a source of income for women. As a result of these two trends, thousands of women were shut out of Ireland’s economy.
Possibilities for both money and marriage, however, waited for Irish girls on the other side of the Atlantic. Women without dowries could find husbands in America. They could also find jobs, especially as maids.
Irish women were more likely to enter domestic service than women of other immigrant groups. In part this was because women of other nationalities often came to America with their husbands or fathers, while many Irish immigrant women were unmarried and unattached to families. As domestic servants, they would receive housing and meals as well as wages.
Service work offered more than shelter, food, and money, however. It was also an introduction to the new culture in which the immigrants found themselves. These young women had come to the United States to settle permanently. Living with their employers helped them adapt to their new society by giving them an inside look at middle-class America.
But while they lived inside American homes, maids were still outsiders. Faraway from their own families, some servants hungered for closeness with the families they served, but often they were ignored. “What I minded . . . was the awful lonesomeness,” recalled one former maid. The family members had nothing to do with her, except to give her orders. “It got to feel sort of crushing at last.”
The work was demanding, too. Domestic servants cooked, cleaned, cared for children, climbed stairs endlessly, and were expected to be on call around the clock. This lack of personal freedom led one woman to choose factory work over service:
It’s freedom that we want when the day’s work is done. I know some nice girls . . . that make more money and dress better and everything for being in service. . . . But they’re never sure of one minute that’s their own when they’re in the house. Our day [at the factory] is ten hours long, but when it’s done it’s done, and we can do what we like with the evenings.
But factory labor was also hard to endure. The textile mills of New England, where Irish women were a large part of the workforce, were dusty and noisy. Working conditions were dangerous. In 1860, for example, a mill in Lowell collapsed, trapping nine hundred workers. A fire broke out, adding to the terror and devastation. Eighty-eight people died.
Irish women were heavily employed in the sewing trades. “No female that can handle a needle need be idle,” one of them wrote home. By 1900 a third of all seamstresses and dressmakers in the United States were Irish women. Like jobs in the textile factories, though, sewing work was often exhausting, dirty, and repetitive.
Young seamstresses work on Irish lace, New York City, 1912.
Still, for many Irish women, America really was a land of opportunity. A daughter wrote home to her father in 1850 to say “this is a good place and a good country.” America represented not only jobs and wages but also self-sufficiency, a chance for women to take care of themselves without depending on husbands or fathers. As one of them wrote to a younger sister still in Ireland, “I am getting along splendid and likes my work . . . it seems like a new life.”
Irish Power
Irish immigrant women were mainly limited to domestic service or factory work, but their daughters had more choices. In 1900, 61 percent of Irish women who had immigrated were seamstresses or laundresses, but only 19 percent of the Irish women who had been born in America followed those trades. Irish American daughters were getting educations and entering white-collar jobs such as teaching, nursing, and secretarial work.
Advances for Irish women reflected a broader pattern of Irish success, as the second generation moved up the social and economic ladder. The family of John Kearney of Poughkeepsie, New York, is an example of that pattern. Kearney emigrated from Ireland to America, where he worked first as an unskilled laborer and then as a junk dealer. One of his sons rose from postal clerk to superintendent of city streets, and another started as a grocery clerk and eventually became the inspector of the city’s waterworks.
The fact that the Irish were white helped them assimilate into the mainstream. White immigrants could become naturalized citizens. White young people could apply to the best colleges and universities. The Chinese were prevented by racial laws from becoming naturalized citizens, and large numbers of African Americans had had their right to vote stripped away. But Irish Americans had suffrage, and they used their right to vote to gain political power.
In urban areas with large Irish populations, including New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, Irish voters supported Irish candidates. By 1890 the Irish had captured most of the Democratic Party organizations in Northern cities. Mayors and city councilmen, in turn, rewarded voters with jobs in police and fire departments, city-owned subways and ports, and in city hall itself. Irish political bosses also awarded public works projects to Irish-owned construction companies. At the same time, ethnic associations for people of Irish descent served as job networks, in which people helped each other find work. Through these ethnic strategies, Irish Americans cooperated with each other to rise from rags to riches.
At the same time, though, the success of the Irish Americans challenged their sense of ethnic identity and unity. Some immigrants urged each other to teach their children Gaelic, the Irish language. They wanted Irish Americans to keep alive their connection to Ireland and its history. Other Irish Americans, however, celebrated the fact that life in the United States was different from the old life. One immigrant said:
The second generation here are not interested in their ancestors . . . we have never told them of the realities of life [in Ireland], and would not encourage any of them to visit. When we left there, we left the old world behind, we are all American citizens and proud of it.