What Hath God Wrought (121 page)

Historians conventionally distinguish between migrations prompted by “pull” and those prompted by “push.” The California Gold Rush was a classic example of “pull”; the Irish Potato Famine an extreme case of “push.” The years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and before the Great Famine had already seen substantial emigration from Ireland to the United States. Although Protestants comprised only about one-fourth of the Irish population, they composed three-fourths of the Irish migrants to America before 1840. Like many others who came to the New World, these tended to be single young men, ambitious and responding to the pull of high wages for skilled labor and the chance for farmland of one’s own. Whenever the U.S. economy encountered hard times, this immigration fell off.
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The push of the Famine significantly altered these patterns. The number of Irish emigrants soared, 90 percent of them now Catholics. The potato blight encouraged landlords to evict tenants and convert their estates to pasture for livestock, so the number of jobs in agriculture permanently declined. Hunger peaked in 1849, but emigration continued to grow as people saved their strength and money to escape what now seemed like an overpopulated rural Ireland. In 1845, 77,000 people left; in 1848, 106,000; in 1851, 250,000. Single women and families with children joined the single men in departing the blighted country. But indentured servitude no longer provided a means to pay for ocean passage; so except in a few cases, where local authorities or landlords subsidized departure, the poorest people, the ones most in danger of starving, could not afford to emigrate. While death fell disproportionately on the very young and the very old, emigrants typically consisted of young adults in their prime. (The average age of Irish immigrants to the United States at this time was 22.3 years.) Most emigrants represented the social stratum just above destitution, that is, they were tenant peasants, either evicted or choosing to leave, or itinerant laborers and domestic servants, accustomed to moving about Ireland in search of work and now looking overseas. They benefited from the improvements in ocean transportation that led to more frequent sailings and lower transatlantic fares, which seldom now exceeded £3 10s. (the equivalent of $338 in 2005). By a combination of hard work, extreme thrift, and luck, they succeeded in saving the price of a ticket. Although unskilled, most of them knew English, not just the Irish language; indeed, many had achieved literacy and could take advantage of the newspapers and advertisements that described and compared employment opportunities available in other English-speaking countries. The communications revolution had penetrated even rural Ireland.
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Prospective emigrants learned that getting the cheapest fares to North America often required taking a ferry to Liverpool, where the ships that brought cotton from the United States and timber from Canada welcomed passengers for the return voyage. A trip across the Irish Sea also afforded the opportunity to earn money in England to put toward the Atlantic crossing. The routes to Boston and Quebec were slightly shorter and therefore cheaper than sailing to New York; New Orleans of course cost the most. Some Irish emigrants went to Canada to take advantage of periodic British government subsidies designed to populate the empire, only to walk across the border to the United States, where better economic opportunities beckoned. American authorities did not monitor overland immigration from Canada, so their number is unknown.
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Ellen and Richard Holland from Kenmare in southwest Ireland were among the poorest of the immigrants. They and their three children could never have come up with passage money; their landlord, the marquess of Landsdowne, paid their way to Liverpool and thence to New York. They settled in Five Points, the most notorious slum on Manhattan, amidst other people from their home county. Richard became a day laborer, and Ellen took in washing; no doubt the three children worked too. Overcrowded as it was, their urban tenement compared favorably with their cabin in the old country; it had a wooden floor rather than a dirt one, and a ceiling of plaster instead of insect-filled thatch. Amazingly, a scant thirty months after arrival, Ellen Holland deposited in the Emigrant Savings Bank $110 (equivalent to over $2,500 in 2005). Even after Richard and their eldest boy succumbed to high urban mortality, the widowed Ellen continued to save money. The historian who has traced the Hollands and other peasants relocated from the Landsdowne estate to Five Points declares her thrift not uncommon. Coming as they did from a less well developed economy, Irish immigrants had more difficulty adjusting to American life than British and German immigrants, but nevertheless they rose to the occasion. Their peasant background did not prevent the Irish immigrants from seizing the modest opportunities America presented to them.
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Yet emigrants from Ireland did not forget their homeland when they left it for another country. From their hard-won earnings, they sent back money to family members left behind, often enabling them to come and reunite their kin group on a new shore, a pattern known as “chain migration.” Remittances from Irish Americans greatly exceeded the contributions of either the British government or private charities in tangible help to the stricken Irish countryside in the years and generations following 1845. Only one Irish immigrant in twelve left the United States to return to Ireland, compared with one in three among U.S. nineteenth-century immigrants in general who went back home.
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The people who contrived to escape from their country’s horrific ordeal and rebuild their lives elsewhere perpetuated much of Irish culture and replicated their religion in many locations thousands of miles away. These were not passive victims, uprooted prisoners of a premodern outlook (as they have sometimes been portrayed), but resourceful, courageous, indomitable fighters.
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And fighters they needed to be, for Irish emigrants who came to the United States encountered both political hostility and economic discrimination.

Immigration generally confers an economic benefit on the country that receives it, because the immigrants are typically adults ready to work, for whom the sending country has already born the costs of rearing. Irish immigrants played an important role in railroad and canal construction and staffing the emerging industries of the North, as well as alleviating the chronic northern shortage of domestic help. But American workers did not look upon the advent of hordes of hungry Irish as an advantage to the country; they looked upon them as competitors in the job market. Whenever real wages came under severe pressure, native-born workers naturally blamed the immigrants. Artisans who feared industrialization blamed them for the spread of the factory system. Unable to afford to move farther west, many Irish collected in the port cities of New York and Boston, where they found themselves also blamed for the congested, unhealthy, and dangerous conditions of urban life.
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Heavy British and German immigration also occurred in the 1840s and ’50s. Germany suffered a milder version of the potato blight, provoking in April 1847 three days of rioting in Berlin that the German press termed “the Potato Revolution.” The newcomers from Britain and Germany avoided much of the unpopularity of the Irish, however, partly because most of them were Protestants, and partly because more of them could afford to move beyond the port cities into the hinterland, where they took up a variety of occupations, including farming. Immigration from all sources in the decade following 1845 totaled almost three million persons, the greatest in American history relative to the resident population. The foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population increased from an estimated 8.2 in 1840 to 9.7 in 1850, the first time the census recorded it; the percentage would increase to 13.2 in 1860.
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(The high point was 14.7 percent in 1910; in the early twenty-first century it is about 12 percent.)

The surge in immigration, particularly that of the Irish, provoked a dramatic reaction among the native born. Nativist sentiment combined economic anxieties about the new immigration with ethnic stereotyping of the Irish and long-standing religious distrust of Roman Catholicism. It could appeal to both working-class and middle-class voters. After 1846 many native-born citizens went over to what had earlier seemed the eccentric views of Samuel F. B. Morse, the fear that immigration constituted a threat to American economic and political stability. In 1850, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner appeared, a nativist secret society whose members, when questioned about it, invariably claimed to “know nothing.” In derision, Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
termed nativism the “Know-Nothing” movement, and the name stuck.

The antebellum nativist movement, unlike that of later years, did not undertake to curtail immigration itself, but to limit the political power of the immigrants, by denying the suffrage to noncitizens, extending the residency requirement for citizenship, and restricting officeholding to native-born citizens. Like the Antimasons earlier, the nativist movement transformed itself from a group of local voluntary associations into a nationwide political party in an effort to obtain its objectives. (Starting up a new political party was easier in the nineteenth century than today, because ballot access was no problem. The parties themselves printed the ballots, so any group could print its own and try to persuade voters to cast them.) In the North, the nativist “American Party” probably drew approximately equal numbers of Whig and Democratic voters into its fold; Morse himself was a Democrat. In the South, it attracted mostly Whigs.
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Overall, the nativist movement harmed the Whig Party politically more than its rival; Catholic immigrants rallied to defend themselves against it by voting for the rousingly pro-immigrant Democratic Party. Because of the anti-antislavery stance of the Roman Catholic Church, some abolitionists and supporters of the restriction of slavery felt sympathy with nativism, although others like Seward and Wilmot firmly dissociated themselves from it. The leaders of the two national parties agreed in condemning nativism, both as a matter of principle and because they saw it as a political threat. Such apprehensions were justified, for nativism reflected discontent with the existing parties and played a major role in the demise of the second party system during the 1850s. Those Democrats who joined the nativists in the early 1850s often moved into the new Republican Party a few years later.
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VII

The election of 1848 marked not only a change of the party in power but a revolution of sorts in American politics: the crumbling away of the second party system. Ethnic issues made critical by soaring immigration began their rise to the forefront of politics, where they would remain for several years in the 1850s. Even more importantly, the election commenced a process that led to sectional issues dominating over all others, a dominance that would then last for a generation. The economic issues that had preoccupied the America of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams—banking, the tariff, internal improvements—no longer constituted the pivot around which politics moved. Polk had won a new empire for his countrymen, and now they had to decide what they wanted to do with it, and in particular whether slavery should control it. Within a few years a new party system—the one we still have—would arise in response to this challenge.

Henry Clay had been in retirement since his narrow and unexpected defeat in the election of 1844. On November 13, 1847, in a major policy address delivered in his hometown of Lexington, he announced his candidacy for 1848 on a platform of taking no territory from Mexico except for a modestly defined Texas. “The sterile lands of Mexico,” he warned, “might prove a fatal acquisition, producing distraction, dissension, division, possibly disunion.” The war itself he branded “unnecessary and of offensive aggression.” “No earthly consideration would have ever tempted or provoked me to vote for” it, he insisted. Far from advocating the expansion of slavery, he reminded his audience that “I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil,” and supported gradual emancipation and the colonization society. He called upon Congress (which now included a Whig House) to define the objectives of the war.
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James Gordon Bennett spent five hundred dollars to run a special express train from Lexington to Cincinnati, where the telegraph connected to New York City, so Clay’s speech could appear in his
New York Herald
the very next day. The penny paper editor’s desire for a scoop trumped even his Democratic Party loyalty.

Despite the accuracy of his foresight, Clay lost the Whig nomination. Ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February wiped out his No Territory platform, and his association with thirty-four years of public policy debates had become a liability. Even so sincere a Whig as Representative Lincoln felt the party needed a new face. Winfield Scott, a leading contender for the nomination based on his impressive military achievements, had been compromised by the president’s accusations and some of his own ill-considered public remarks. On the fourth ballot, the Whig convention that met in June at Philadelphia nominated Zachary Taylor, the hero of Buena Vista, and ran him without a platform. Some of the issues historically associated with the Whig Party, such as currency and banking, had become passé. But one issue still alive was fear of executive usurpation, which Polk had certainly exacerbated. Historians have shaken their heads over a party running a military hero of a war they had opposed. Whigs at the time felt desperate to win, believing that Polk had so betrayed his trust that constitutional government itself was at stake. In the end, the convention shared Polk’s opinion that a war hero would be the strongest of Whig candidates. Taylor, a Regular Army man who had won his biggest victory with a largely volunteer force, transcended the unpopular authoritarianism of military life (as Scott did not). The candidacy of Old Rough and Ready offered a way to repudiate Polk’s presidency but not the soldiers who fought his war, while minimizing sectional tensions within the party.