How the Irish Became White

Noel Ignatiev

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135070694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

'…from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called 'path breaking, ' 'seminal, ' 'essential, ' a 'must read.' How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, Amherst

The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person's skin. Noel Ignatiev's 1995 book – the first published work of one of America's leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

1

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

In 1841 sixty thousand Irish issued an Address to their compatriots in America calling upon them to join with the abolitionists in the struggle against slavery. Heading the list of signers was the name of Daniel O’Connell, known throughout Ireland as the Liberator. The Address was the first time Irish-Americans, as a group, were asked to choose between supporting and opposing the color line. Their response marked a turning point in their evolution toward membership in an oppressing race.

To an extent rare in the annals of nations, the history of Ireland between Emmett’s Conspiracy of 1803 (aimed at establishing an independent Irish state) and the Great Famine that began in 1845 was the personal story of one man, Daniel O’Connell. He had founded the Catholic Association, the first mass political party in history, which drew its support from low dues collected every week in Catholic churches throughout the country. He had developed the methods of grass roots organizing and the mass meeting which made him the first modern agitator. He had led the campaign for Catholic Emancipation; at a time when Catholics were prohibited from holding public office, an uprising of poor rural voters had elected him to the House of Commons. The campaign succeeded, in 1830, in overturning the last formal restrictions against Catholic participation in public life. He still held his seat in Westminster, where he headed the thirty or so Irish members who constituted something of an Irish party. As a symbol of the esteem his countrymen felt for him, he held the largely honorific post of Lord Mayor of Dublin. O’Connell then led the campaign to repeal the Act of Union of 1800 (which merged the Irish and British Parliaments) and restore an Irish parliament under the crown, known as the movement for Home Rule, or Repeal. The Catholic and Irish press, and even general circulation newspapers, in both Ireland and the U.S., frequently reprinted his speeches in parliament and at meetings of the organization he led, the Loyal National Repeal Association. He was the most popular figure in Ireland and among Irish throughout the world. ¹

Ireland had an old antislavery tradition, going back to the Council of Armagh in 1177, which had prohibited Irish trade in English slaves. It was a common boast that in seven centuries no slave had set foot on Irish soil.² O’Connell may have been brought to antislavery by the English abolitionist, James Cropper, who argued that Irish textiles could be traded for East Indian sugar, thus dealing at once a blow to Irish poverty and West Indian slavery.³ In 1830, when O’Connell first entered Parliament, with one other Irish member to support him, a representative of the West India interest approached him, offering the support of their twenty-seven members on Irish issues in return for his silence on the slavery question. He replied, “Gentlemen, God knows I speak for the saddest people the sun sees; but may my right hand forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if to save Ireland, even Ireland, I forget the negro one single hour!”⁴

From as early as 1829 O’Connell coupled his denunciations of slavery with attacks on American hypocrisy. “Let America, in the fullness of her pride,” he declared, “wave on high her banner of freedom and its blazing stars.… In the midst of their laughter and their pride, I point them to the negro children screaming for their mother from whose bosom they have been torn.… Let them hoist the flag of liberty, with the whip and rack on one side, and the star of freedom upon the other.”⁵ It would become a familiar theme of his; he declared that, although he had often wished to visit America, he would not do so while slavery existed there.⁶

O’Connell’s declarations aroused resentment in America; he noted in 1835 that “he had given the Americans some severe but merited reproofs, for which they had paid him wages in abuse and scurrility.”⁷ Among those who expressed their concern were a group of prominent Philadelphia Irish, in a letter to him in February 1838, responding to newspaper reports of a speech he had recently made at an antislavery meeting in London, in which he had reportedly spoken harshly of the American character. The sentiments attributed to him “had caused no inconsiderable excitement,” observed his correspondents. “In the United States,” they wrote, “there are hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and countrywomen who have by persecution been driven from the land of their nativity. Here they have been hospitably received and honourably admitted to all the rights, privileges and immunities of native Americans.” Noting that “there was not a man [among them] who does not admire and do willing homage to your principles,” they went on to remind O’Connell “how jealously and suspiciously we may be looked upon by our native American fellow citizens if the man, whom we have delighted to honour, shall by them believed to have en masse deemed them the basest of the base and the vilest of the vile.” They asked him to take the appropriate steps to remove from the Irish-Americans “the odium which … had been cast upon them …”⁸ In this letter, these spokesmen were giving voice, not for the last time, to the insecurities of an immigrant group whose claim to the “rights, privileges, and immunities of native Americans” was not as secure as they might have wished.

Given O’Connell’s record on the slavery question and his influence among Irish everywhere, it was natural that abolitionists in America would wish to make maximum use of his name. On October 20, 1838, Elizur Wright, corresponding secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, wrote thanking him for his support: “Severe as your language is, it shall not make you our enemy. While you are dealing death to American slavery you are in truth acting the most friendly part to genuine American institutions.” Wright continued, “I have been informed that a body of your countrymen in Philadelphia some time since wrote to you for an explanation of language used in one of your Anti-Slavery speeches, and got for answer what it has not suited them to publish! It seems to me that you may do great service to the slave by sending over an address to the Irish portion of our population, giving plainly your views on slavery. They will listen to you.” To make sure O’Connell appreciated the importance and the difficulty of what he would be taking on, Wright added, “In drawing up such an address you will need to bear in mind that, as our parties stand, your countrymen among us hold the balance of power; that three fourths of them at least are democrats and have followed their party to most undemocratic results …”⁹

In January of 1840, James Haughton, Dublin grain merchant and Unitarian, supporter of Repeal, founder of the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society, and regular correspondent of the leading North American antislavery journal of the day, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, raised with O’Connell the subject of America. “[T]he Irishmen in that country,” he wrote, “are such a powerful and influential body that they exercise a paramount influence in the election of the president and in elections of the members of the various legislatures there; but most unfortunately that influence has been given heretofore in favour of slavery.… Now with regard to our countrymen in America, the fact stated is most lamentable, your influence over their minds is very great, would you think it wise to address them on this subject one of your powerful appeals?”¹⁰

The issue came up later that same year at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in June, when a Quaker Englishman who had settled in upstate New York, James C. Fuller, asked O’Connell to issue an address to Irish in America. O’Connell replied that he already had such an address in mind.¹¹ Following the Convention a stream of visitors made their way to Ireland. Among the American abolitionists who toured the country were Garrison, Wendell and Ann Phillips, James G. Birney, and Charles Lenox Remond, who, as a black man, met a particularly enthusiastic response.¹² Remond and his travelling companion John A. Collins, along with Haughton and his fellow Irish abolitionists Richard Allen and Richard Davis Webb, drew up an Address from the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America in the summer of 1841. By July, fifteen thousand people had signed it, including many Catholic clergymen.¹³ Belfast reported that nine thousand signatures were collected during Remond’s visit. Estimates of the total number of signers varied, the figure most commonly cited being sixty thousand. O’Connell reportedly was among the last to sign it, and had not known of its existence until asked to sign. Remond brought the Address with him to America when he returned in December, 1841.¹⁴ “Never were my hopes higher, my expectations stronger, or my zeal more ardent, than at present,” announced Remond as he prepared to depart from England.¹⁵ Given its importance to the story, the Address is worth quoting at length:

DEAR FRIENDS: You are at a great distance from your native land! A wide expanse of water separates you from the beloved country of your birth …

The object of this address is to call your attention to the subject of SLAVERY IN AMERICA—that foul blot upon the noble institution and the fair name of your adopted country.…

Slavery is the most tremendous invasion of the natural, inalienable rights of man, and of some of the noblest gifts of God, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ … All who are not for it must be against it. NONE CAN BE NEUTRAL.…

America is cursed by slavery! WE CALL UPON YOU TO UNITE WITH THE ABOLITIONISTS, and never to cease your efforts until perfect liberty be granted to every one of her inhabitants, the black man as well as the white man.…

JOIN WITH THE ABOLITIONISTS EVERYWHERE. They are the only consistent advocates of liberty. Tell every man that you do not understand liberty for the white man, and slavery for the black man; that you are for LIBERTY FOR ALL, of every color, creed, and country.…

Irishmen and Irishwomen! Treat the colored people as your equals, as brethren. By your memories of Ireland, continue to love liberty—hate slavery—CLING BY THE ABOLITIONISTS—and in America you will do honor to the name of Ireland.¹⁶

The Address was first presented to an American audience on January 28, 1842, at a meeting in Faneuil Hall, Boston. Although the nominal purpose of the meeting was to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, the abolitionists made special efforts to publicize it among the Irish, including posting handbills around the city and taking out an advertisement in the Boston Pilot, the Catholic paper. “I am confident that this address will do much good in this country,” Collins wrote.¹⁷

Garrison chaired the meeting. Phillips introduced several resolutions which were adopted by acclamation, including one supporting Ireland in her struggle against “the fraudulent act of Union.” Edmund Quincy drew the parallel between the struggle of Ireland for Repeal and the American War of Independence. Col. J. P. Miller of Vermont, who claimed Irish descent, declared himself a Repealer, to thunderous applause. George Bradburn of Nantucket, well known in American Catholic circles for his vigorous opposition to nativism, made a special appeal to the Irish as laboring people. “Slavery,” he said, “strikes at the interest of every laboring man.” Frederick Douglass mimicked the manner of the slaveholders and the Southern clergy, contrasting the hard, horny hands and muscular frames of the laborers, adapted for working, with the slender frames and long, delicate fingers of the masters, matching their brilliant intellects suited to thinking. James C. Fuller, who had stood in the Irish House of Peers when Castlereagh took the bribe for supporting Union, declared that the Irish immigrants to America were republicans by choice, and therefore carried more responsibility to the antislavery cause than the natives. Garrison likened the slaveholder’s attitude toward the slave to England’s attitude toward Ireland, and then read the Address aloud. Phillips took the floor again, reviewing the history of the Irish commitment to freedom and the longstanding opposition of the Popes to slavery. “Will you ever return to his master the slave who once sets foot on the soil of Massachusetts?” he asked. “No, no, no!” answered the crowd. “Will you ever raise to office or power the man who will not pledge his utmost effort against slavery?” Again the answer was, “No, no, no!” “Then may we not hope well for freedom?” (It was this speech that led O’Connell to declare Phillips superior to himself as an orator).¹⁸ The last speaker was Remond, who contrasted the honor and respect he had received abroad with the indignities to which he had been subjected since his return, and thanked the city authorities for allowing the meeting the use of the hall.

The Liberator estimated that no fewer than four thousand people attended the meeting, including a large number of Irish from Boston and vicinity (whom one observer remarked could be distinguished by their dress as easily as the Negroes).¹⁹ “A more united and enthusiastic meeting was never held in the Old Cradle of Liberty. Its influence will be felt throughout the country,” concl...