The American Irish

A History

Kevin Kenny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317889151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The American Irish: A History, is the first concise, general history of its subject in a generation. It provides a long-overdue synthesis of Irish-American history from the beginnings of emigration in the early eighteenth century to the present day. While most previous accounts of the subject have concentrated on the nineteenth century, and especially the period from the famine (1840s) to Irish independence (1920s), The American Irish: A History incorporates the Ulster Protestant emigration of the eighteenth century and is the first book to include extensive coverage of the twentieth century. Drawing on the most innovative scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic in the last generation, the book offers an extended analysis of the conditions in Ireland that led to mass migration and examines the Irish immigrant experience in the United States in terms of arrival and settlement, social mobility and assimilation, labor, race, gender, politics, and nationalism. It is ideal for courses on Irish history, Irish-American history, and the history of American immigration more generally.

Chapter 1

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

While popular legend holds that mass emigration from Ireland commenced with the Great Famine of the 1840s, the Irish migration to America actually began in the seventeenth century and assumed the character of a mass movement as early as 1720. An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people, three-quarters of them Catholics, left Ireland for the American colonies in the seventeenth century, and as many as 100,000 Catholic Irish may have come to America in the century after 1700. Virtually no evidence has survived on these Catholic settlers, however. Mainly young, single, rootless males, they seem to have blended into the general population rather than establishing themselves as a separate ethnic group in America. A great deal more is known about the remaining Irish immigrants of the eighteenth century, some 250,000 to 400,000 Protestants who crossed the Atlantic for the American colonies, about three-quarters of them Presbyterians from the northern province of Ulster.¹

The volume of emigration in the eighteenth century may appear insignificant compared to the period 1820–1920, when almost five million people left Ireland for North America. But the population of Ulster in 1750 was only half a million, and the population of Ireland as a whole was just under 2.5 million (compared to 8.5 million on the eve of the Great Famine a century later). The demographic impact of the eighteenth-century migration was therefore considerable, with the 500,000 or so emigrants making up one-fifth of Ireland’s population at mid-century, and the 250,000–300,000 Presbyterians accounting for half the total population of Ulster at this time.²

The impact of Irish migration on the history of the American colonies was also very important. People of Irish origin accounted for an estimated 14 to 17 per cent of the white population of the United States in 1790, the dominant presence being those of Ulster Presbyterian origin, who made up about 10 per cent. The verdict of one historian that ‘emigration from Ulster was as much a feature of American history in the eighteenth century as Irish Catholic emigration in the next century and had a much greater effect on the development of the country’, may be something of an exaggeration; but it underlines the need to expand the definition of ‘Irish-American’ history to include the distinctive migration of the eighteenth century. Over three-quarters of Ireland’s transatlantic emigrants in the eighteenth century were Protestants, at a time when Protestants accounted for at most one-third of the Irish population. Irish America before the 1830s was decidedly Protestant in composition, and that must be the starting point for any history of the American Irish.³

ULSTER

Before turning to the Presbyterian migration of the eighteenth century, it is necessary to say a few words about the smaller but still significant emigration from Ireland to the American and Caribbean colonies in the seventeenth century. This emigration was sporadic and uncoordinated, consisting largely of young, single males. Very little is known about it. Most of the migrants were Catholics, and they came to the American colonies as soldiers, sailors, convicts and especially as indentured servants. Thousands of Irish political and military prisoners were sold into involuntary servitude in the West Indies after the British soldier and political leader, Oliver Cromwell, led a military conquest of Ireland in 1649–50. An estimated 12,000 Irish were living in the Caribbean by the 1660s. The white population of Barbados at that time was about one-fifth Irish, and as much as one-third of the free population of the neighbouring Leeward Islands was Irish a decade later. The Cromwellian deportees are sometimes referred to as ‘slaves’ in the historiography, but they were more properly prisoners or servants. To be classified as slaves in a sense recognizable to the modern reader, their status would have had to become hereditary. One reason why this never happened is that many, perhaps most, of these people died of disease or overwork within a few years of arrival, without wives or offspring. So, too, did most Africans, at least at first. But by the late seventeenth century African slaves were living longer and were less expensive than they had been, so that hereditary black slavery replaced servitude as the chief source of bound labour for the American colonies, especially on plantations producing staple crops.⁴

Bondage rather than freedom was the norm for most poor people, black or white, in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. One form of servitude or another was the typical condition for members of the lower orders of society. Among the new inhabitants of the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were two principal categories of the ‘unfree’: slaves and servants. The first of these forms of bound labour never applied to the Irish; and by the late seventeenth century it had been defined in racially exclusive terms, applying only to people of African origin. While thousands of Irishmen came to the West Indies involuntarily as prisoners, most Irish settlers in the seventeenth-century Americas came as servants. In exchange for passage to America, these servants typically signed contracts (indentures) pledging their labour for a fixed term, usually three or four years. On arrival in the colonies, captains offered their cargoes of indentured servants for sale.⁵

Irish indentured servants in the seventeenth century included large numbers of artisans (skilled workers) with trades considered useful in the colonies. They did not come from the lowest ranks of the rural poor, who generally did not leave the country in this period. Irish servants began to move to Virginia and Maryland in significant numbers from the 1620s onward, on ships returning to the two Chesapeake colonies after delivering their cargoes of tobacco and West Indian sugar to Irish ports. By the end of the century, Virginia and Maryland (along with South Carolina) had passed laws restricting the entry of ‘papists’. But these measures reflected the new availability of African labour and the general distrust of Catholics rather than a reaction against an inundation of Irish labour, for Irish Catholic emigration never reached a significant scale in the seventeenth century.⁶

While Protestant emigration had also been insignificant before 1700, for more than a century thereafter Presbyterians from the province of Ulster made up the great bulk of the transatlantic migration from Ireland. To grasp the nature of the Irish experience in colonial America, it is necessary first to understand how Ulster came to have such a large Presbyterian population, what life was like for the Presbyterians who settled there, and how and why they left Ireland for the American colonies in such large numbers.

Presbyterians had come to Ulster from Scotland throughout the seventeenth century as part of a concerted campaign of ‘plantation’ designed to secure British rule in Ireland. These ‘Ulster Scots’, as they are still sometimes called, were intended to form a loyal, Protestant bulwark between the native Irish and their English rulers. Scotland, of course, was much closer to Ulster than England was. The migrants came overwhelmingly from the Scottish Lowlands, where most of them paid their rent by performing a specified amount of labour and services for their landlord. Their goal in coming to Ulster was to secure land, ideally in the form of individual homesteads where they could set up as tenant farmers (i.e. renting their own farms from landlords, rather than working on landlords’ estates).⁷

Religion was also of some importance in fuelling the migration from the Scottish Lowlands, though it was not nearly as significant as the desire for land. As Presbyterians, the lowland Scots stood on the extreme wing of the Protestant Reformation. They were alienated not just from the Roman Catholic Church, but from the established Anglican Church as well. They endured religious persecution several times in the seventeenth century, especially under Charles II (1660–83) and James II (1683–90), and must have hoped that emigration to Ulster would provide a haven in which they could practice their religion without interference. Because the migration took place when both Presbyterian zealotry and the persecution of dissenters were at their peak, religion would become a defining theme in the subsequent history of the Ulster Scots on both sides of the Atlantic.⁸

The Scottish plantations of Ulster began in 1608 and lasted, with some interruptions, until the end of the seventeenth century. Enticed by the availability of rental land confiscated from the native Catholic population, between 30,000 and 40,000 Scots, most of them Presbyterians, left lowland Scotland for Ulster between 1608 and 1618. By 1640 about 100,000 Scots had settled in Ulster. The migration from Scotland was disrupted by the outbreak of civil war in England in 1640, but resumed after the Cromwellian settlement in 1652, increased in volume after the accession of Charles II in 1660, and reached flood tide after William of Orange defeated the Catholic followers of James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. An estimated 50,000 Scots settled in Ulster between 1690 and 1697 alone. By 1700, Scottish Presbyterians dominated the eastern half of Ulster (counties Ulster, Down and Antrim), and were present in substantial numbers in Derry, Tyrone and east Donegal. While Presbyterian tenant farmers were clearly better off than the dispossessed Catholic population below them, they were nonetheless subordinate to the Anglican (or ‘Ascendancy’) class above them, who owned the bulk of the land and belonged to the established Church.⁹

Just over two million people lived in Ireland in 1715, about 600,000 of them in the province of Ulster, where roughly one-third of the population were Anglicans, a little over one-third were Catholics and slightly under one-third were Presbyterians of Scottish origin. Thereafter, the number of Ulster Scots grew rapidly through natural increase, so that Presbyterians soon formed the largest Protestant denomination in Ulster. They remained sternly aloof from the surrounding population, in sharp distinction from British planters elsewhere in Ireland, such as the Cromwellian planters of Munster who quickly intermarried and were ultimately absorbed into the local population. In Ulster, the Scottish planters retained a separate group identity grounded in the religion they had taken with them from their homelands, a religion that remained largely immune from the transformations occurring in eighteenth-century Scodand, where Presbyterianism evolved into a hierarchical and often dogmatic established church. Ulster Presbyterianism, by contrast, remained more egalitarian in its structure and was dependent entirely for its financial support on individual congregations or presbyteries. This looser, more fluid structure arguably made the Ulster version of Presbyterianism more friendly to revivalist evangelical movements of the type that would characterize eighteenth-century America. Signs of evangelicalism and communal conversions were evident in Ulster itself as early as the seventeenth century, though American-style individualist evangelicalism, based on a conversion experience and personal salvation, does not seem to have become common in Ulster until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹⁰

The religious system developed by Ulster Presbyterians was highly organized and comprehensive. Each congregation governed its affairs through a body known as the kirk session, composed of the minister and the lay elders. Groups of congregations were arranged into presbyteries (composed again of ministers and elders), and from 1691 there was a General Synod. The individual kirks enforced a remarkable degree of religious and moral discipline. Elders inquired into and scrutinized the behaviour of their neighbours, and reported transgressions to the kirk sessions, which could summon the accused for examination and impose public penances, excommunication and ostracism. Moral offenses as well as theological ones were subject to punishment. To modern sensibilities, this system of church government may appear harsh and unattractive, but by prevailing standards it was also very democratic; ministers were chosen by their congregations (usually from the ranks of tenant farmers) and the laity played a very active role in church affairs. Precisely because the kirks expressed the will of the whole community, they were expected to investigate such matters as dishonesty in business, quarrelling with neighbours or outbidding a fellow Presbyterian who had a prior claim to a piece of land. In this way, Presbyterianism permeated every aspect of social existence, providing a considerable degree of communal cohesion. Not surprisingly, this communal character was also evident in the Presbyterian migration to America, with families, congregations and entire communities emigrating together whenever possible.¹¹

One final, very important aspect of Ulster Scots society requires clarification before turning to examine their great migration to America: How did people make a living? The Ulster Scots were neither as rich as the Anglican elite nor as poor as the Catholic majority. Only a very small minority belonged to the landowning class, which was dominated by Anglicans, many of them absentees who rarely visited Ireland. The great majority of Ulster Presbyterians in the eighteenth century rented land and cultivated the soil. Only the largest of these tenant farmers were engaged exclusively in farming. The remainder practiced some combination of agriculture and linen production, whether as virtually landless labourers, as precarious smallholders, or (in the case of a prosperous minority) as farmer-craftsmen who purchased yarn from local merchants and employed poor farmers and journeymen (apprentices) to weave it. In the strongholds of Presbyterian settlement (especially counties Antrim, Derry and Down), these independent farmer-craftsmen lived on relatively large holdings, practicing a mixture of tillage (raising crops) and pasture (tending animals) and producing linen cloth for direct sale on the market. They were the bulwark of Ulster Scots society.¹²

At the opposite end of the social scale were the smallholders and cottier-weavers. Smallholders rented a few acres of land, drawing from it whatever sustenance they could, and meeting financial obligations like rents and tithes (dues owed to the established church) by spinning yarn or weaving linen. More precarious still than the smallholders were the cottier-weavers. In Irish history, the term cottier is roughly equivalent to the Scottish cotter, with the word cottage as the root in each case. Just as in Scotland, Irish cottiers were landless labourers who received a small plot of land and a cottage (more accurately a cabin), in return for a specified number of days’ work performed for their landlord. Cottier tenancy was essentially a type of wage labour, the ‘wage’ taking the form of housing and access to land. Contracts were usually annual, and the plot of land in question might be two acres or less. In most parts of Catholic Ireland, cottiers subsisted by growing enough potatoes to feed their families, and in some cases raising a pig or a few chickens. While their landlords sold their products for profit, the cottiers themselves typically had little or no involvement in the wider capitalist marketplace. In Ulster, besides growing food for subsistence, they usually spun yarn or wove linen cloth as part of their labour contract, hence the term ‘cottier-weaver’.¹³

There is also some evidence among the poorest of the Ulster Scots of joint rather than individual tenancies. In much of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Scotland and Catholic Ireland, communities held their land in common rather than in separate family plots. In Scotland and in Scottish Ulster this system was known as runrig; in Catholic Ulster and elsewhere in Ireland it was known as rundale. Under this system, land held in common was typically divided into an area called the infield, used for crop cultivation; a larger area, called the outfield, used for pasture, cultivation or both; and a mountain or hillside, held in common for the grazing of animals. In the infield, each family held its land in numerous small strips, graded according to quality and arranged to give equal access to pasture and water. The essence of this system was the division of land in terms of the common good rather than individual profit. It had been widely practiced in lowland Scodand at the time of the Ulster plantation, and was still common in more isolated parts of Ireland in the late eighteenth century, despite concerted efforts by the British government to eradicate it. The Ulster Scots seem to have practiced rundale on only a very limited scale, however, settling on isolated family farms instead. But they did retain the traditional infield-outfield system, adapting it to the needs of individual farmers rather than the community as a whole. And the poorest of them seem to have practiced much the same forms of partible inheritance as the Catholic Irish, dividing the land equally among their children rather than consolidating it in the hands of a single heir.¹⁴

Women contributed as much as men to the maintenance of the domestic economy. They spun yarn, assisted in linen weaving, made clothing, cultivated, prepared and cooked food, managed most aspects of the household, and bore and raised children. They also worked in the fields, with the extent of their outdoor labour being closely related to the family’s social standing. Yet women are virtually absent from the historiography on the Ulster Scots. They were not granted tracts of land or tenancies; they did not bring lawsuits, nor were suits brought against them; they did not attend school or university, and they could not become ministers. As a result, very little information about them has survived in the historical record. There is probably more information available about women than historians have yet exploited, especially in the records of kirk sessions and in deeds, wills and other public documents dealing with property and dower rights (property brought to the marriage by the bride). Archaeological work in both Ireland and Scodand may also yield important data. Pending this research, these women (whether in Scodand, Ireland or the American colonial backcountry) appear in the historiography as subordinate helpmates to men, playing an indispensable role in the household economy.¹⁵

This, then, was the world out of which the Ulster Presbyterian migration of the eighteenth century emerged. The migrants were descendants of Scots who had come to Ulster mainly in the seventeenth century, but what sort of identity did they ascribe to themselves on the eve of their departure to America? Did they see themselves as Irish or Scottish, or as something between or beyond these two? How important was regional identity, especially in terms of...