A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (53 page)

Following the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s, when one third of the total population of Ireland disappeared, new waves of poor Irish arrived in Boston and New York City, with an estimated 20 percent of those who set sail dying en route.
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From 1841 to 1850, 780,000 Irish arrived on American shores, and unlike other immigrants, they arrived as families, not as single males. Then, from 1851 to 1860, another 914,000 immigrated. Eventually, there were more Irish in America than in Ireland, and more Irish in New York than in Dublin.
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Fresh from decades of political repression by the British, the Irish congregated in big coastal cities and, seeing the opportunity to belong to part of the power structure, they, more than any other immigrant group, moved into the police and fire departments. An 1869 list of New York City’s Irish and German officeholders (the only two immigrant groups even mentioned!) revealed the stunning dominance of the Irish:

Hibernian primacy in New York City administration was so overwhelming that even in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City a century and a half later, the names of the slain firefighters and police were overwhelmingly Irish.

With the exception of some who moved south—especially the Presbyterian Scots-Irish—new immigrants from the Emerald Isle remained urban and northern. Some already saw this as a problem. An editorial in 1855 from
The Citizen
, an Irish American newspaper, noted: “Westward Ho! The great mistake that emigrants, particularly Irish emigrants, make, on arriving in this country, is, that they remain in New York, and other Atlantic cities, till they are ruined, instead of proceeding at once to the Western country, where a virgin soil, teeming with plenty, invites them to its bosom.”
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It was true that land was virtually free on the frontier, even if basic tools were not. Steven Thernstrom found that if immigrants simply left New England, their chances for economic success dramatically improved, especially as they moved into the ranks of skilled laborers.
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More than the Dutch or Germans, the Irish suffered tremendous discrimination. The work of a deranged Protestant girl, Maria Monk,
Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu in Montreal
(1836), circulated in the United States and fomented anti-Catholic bias that touched off the “nopopery” crusade that afflicted the predominantly Catholic Irish.
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Monk’s surreal work related incredibly fantastic tales of her “life” in a convent in Montreal, where she claimed to have observed tunnels leading to the burial grounds for the babies produced by the illicit relations between priests and nuns, as well as allegations of seductions in confessionals. The Church launched a number of convent inspections that completely disproved these nonsensical claims, but the book had its effect. Protestant mobs in Philadelphia, reacting to the bishop’s request for tax money to fund parochial schools, stormed the Irish sector of town and set off dynamite in Catholic churches.

More than other older immigrant groups, the Irish gravitated to the Democratic Party in overwhelming numbers, partly because of the antielite appeal of the Democrats (which was largely imaginary). Politically, the Irish advanced steadily by using the Democratic Party machinery to elect Irishmen as the mayors of Boston in the 1880s. But there was an underside to this American dream because the Irish “brought to America a settled tradition of regarding the formal government as illegitimate, and the informal one as bearing the true impress of popular sovereignty.”
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Political corruption was ignored: “Stealing an election was rascally, not to be approved, but neither quite to be abhorred.”
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That translated into widespread graft, bribery, and vote fraud, which was made all the easier by party politics that simply required that the parties “get out the vote,” not “get out the
legal
vote.” These traits, and Irish willingness to vote as a block for the Democrats, made them targets for the Know-Nothing Party and other nativist groups.
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The experiences of Germans, the other main immigrant group, differed sharply from the Irish. First recruited to come to Pennsylvania by William Penn, Germans came to the United States in a wave (951,000) in the 1850s following the failure of the 1848 democratic revolutions in Germany. Early Germans in Philadelphia were Mennonites, but other religious Germans followed, including Amish and Calvinists, originating the popular (but wrong) name, Pennsylvania Dutch, which was a mispronunciation of
Deutsch.
Germans often brought more skills than the Irish, especially in the steel, mechanical, musical instrument trades (including Rudolf Wurlitzer and, later, Henry Steinway), and brewing (with brewers such as Schlitz, Pabst, and Budweiser).
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But they also had more experience in land ownership, and had no shortage of good ideas, including the Kentucky long rifle and the Conestoga wagon. John Augustus Roebling invented the wire cable for the suspension bridge to Brooklyn; John Bausch and Henry Lomb pioneered eyeglass lens manufacturing; and Henry Heinz built a powerful food company from the ground up.

Above all, the Germans were farmers, with their farming communities spreading throughout the Appalachian valley. Berlins and Frankforts frequently appear on the map of mid-American towns. For many of them, America did not offer escape so much as opportunity to improve. Unlike the Irish, Germans immediately moved to open land, heading for the German-like northern tier of the Midwest and populating some of the rapidly growing cities there, such as Cincinnati (which in 1860 had 161,000 people—nearly half of them foreign born), Milwaukee, St. Louis, and even as far southwest as Texas.
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One should take care not to emphasize the urban ethnic component of discord in American life too much. For every bar fight in Boston, there was at least one (if not ten) in saloons on the frontier. In Alabama, for example, the local editor of the Cahaba paper editorialized in 1856 that “guns and pistols…[were] fired in and from the alley ways and streets of the town” so frequently that it was “hardly safe to go from house to house.”
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A knife fight on the floor of the Arkansas House led to the gutting of one state representative over the relatively innocuous issue of putting out a bounty on wolf pelts, and a few years later, in 1847, one set of bank directors at the Farmers and Merchants Bank in Nashville engaged in a gun battle with other directors outside the courtroom.
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Many of these clashes were family feuds. Most lacked an ethnic component.

One ethnic group that has suffered great persecution in modern times came to America virtually unnoticed. The first Jews had come to New Amsterdam in 1654, establishing the first North American synagogue a half century later. Over time, a thriving community emerged in what became New York (which, by 1914, had become home to half of all European Jews living in the United States). By 1850 there were perhaps thirty thousand Jews in the United States, but within the next thirty years the number would grow to more than half a million.
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After the boom in textiles in the early 1800s, the Jews emerged as the dominant force in New York’s needle trade, owning all but 17 of the 241 clothing firms in New York City in 1885.
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The largest influx of Jews took place long after the Civil War when Russian Jews sought sanctuary from czarist persecutions. Nevertheless, Jews achieved distinctions during the Civil War on both the Union and Confederate sides. Best known, probably, was Judah P. Benjamin, a Louisiana Whig who was the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate and who served as the Confederacy’s secretary of war. But five Jews won the Medal of Honor for the Union; Edward Rosewater, Lincoln’s telegrapher, was Jewish; and the Cardozo family of New York produced important legal minds both before and after the conflict, including a state supreme court justice (Jacob) and a United States Supreme Court justice (Benjamin), who followed Louis Brandeis, yet another Jew, onto the Supreme Court.

All the immigrant groups found niches, and all succeeded—admittedly at different rates. All except one, that is. African Americans, most of whom came to the colonies as slaves, could point to small communities of “free men of color” in the north, and list numerous achievements. Yet their accomplishments only served to contrast their freedom with the bondage of millions of blacks in the same nation, in some cases only miles away.

Slavery, Still

Thirty years after the Missouri Compromise threatened to unravel the Union, the issue of slavery persevered as strongly as ever. Historians have remained puzzled by several anomalies regarding slavery. For example, even though by the 1850s there were higher profits in manufacturing in the South than in plantation farming, few planters gave up their gang-based labor systems to open factories.

Several facts about slavery must thus be acknowledged at the outset: (1) although slavery was profitable, profits and property rights alone did not explain its perpetuation; (2) the same free market that allowed Africans to be bought and sold at the same time exerted powerful pressures to liberate them; and (3) Southerners needed the force of government to maintain and expand slavery, and without it, a combination of the market and slave revolts would have ultimately ended the institution. In sum, slavery embodied the worst aspects of unfettered capitalism wedded to uninhibited government power, all turning on the egregiously flawed definition of a human as “property.”

Although the vast majority of Southern blacks were slaves prior to 1860, there were, nonetheless, a significant number of free African Americans living in what would become the Confederacy. As many as 262,000 free blacks lived in the South, with the ratio higher in the upper South than in the lower. In Virginia, for example, census returns counted more than 58,000 free blacks out of a total black population of 548,000, and the number of free blacks had actually increased by about 3,700 in the decade prior to the Civil War.
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A large majority of those free African Americans lived in Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Norfolk, Lynchburg, and Petersburg. Virginia debated expelling all free blacks in 1832, but the measure, which was tied to a bill for gradual, compensated emancipation, failed. Free blacks could stay, but for how long?

It goes without saying that most blacks in the American South were slaves. Before the international slave trade was banned in 1808, approximately 661,000 slaves were brought into the United States, or about 7 percent of all Africans transported across the Atlantic.
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America did not receive, by any stretch of the imagination, even a small portion of slaves shipped from Africa: Cuba topped the list with 787,000. By 1860 the South had a slave population of 3.84 million, a figure that represented 60 percent of all the “agricultural wealth” in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

Other indicators reveal how critical a position slavery held in the overall wealth of the South. Wealth estimates by the U.S. government based on the 1860 census showed that slaves accounted for $3
billion
in (mostly Southern) wealth, an amount exceeding the investments in railroads and manufacturing combined! To an extent—but only to an extent—the approaching conflict was one over the definition of property rights.
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It might therefore be said that whenever the historical record says “states’ rights” in the context of sectional debates, the phrase “rights to own slaves” should more correctly be inserted.
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When Alabama’s Franklin W. Bowdon wrote about the property rights in slaves, “If any of these rights can be invaded, there is no security for the remainder,” Northerners instinctively knew that the inverse was true: if one group of people could be condemned to slavery for their race, another could suffer the same fate for their religious convictions, or their political affiliations.
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This aspect of slavery gnawed at the many nonslaveholders who composed the South’s majority. Of all the Southerners who did own slaves, about 12 percent held most of the slaves, whereas some 36 percent of Southern farms in the most fertile valley regions had no slave labor at all; overall nearly half the farms in the cotton belt were slaveless.
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Indeed, in some regions free farmers dominated the politics, particularly eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, northerwestern Mississippi, and parts of Missouri. Even the small farmers who owned slaves steadily moved away from the large cash-crop practice of growing cotton, entering small-scale manufacturing by 1860. If one had little land, it made no sense economically to hold slaves. A field hand in the 1850s could cost $1,200, although prices fell with age and remaining productive years.

The stability and permanence of the system, however, arose from the large plantations, where a division of labor and assignment of slave gangs under the whip could overcome any inefficiencies associated with unfree labor. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in their famous
Time on the Cross
(1974), found that farms with slaves “were 29 percent more productive than those without slaves,” and, more important, that the gains increased as farm size increased.
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What is surprising is that the profitability of slavery was doubted for as long as it was, but that was largely because of the biased comments of contemporaries like antislavery activist Frank Blair, who wrote that “no one from a slave state could pass through ‘the splendid farms of Sangamon and Morgan, without permitting an envious sigh to escape him at the evident superiority of free labor.’”
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Nathaniel Banks argued in the 1850s before audiences in Boston and New York that slavery was “the foe of all industrial progress and the highest material prosperity.”
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It was true that deep pockets of poverty existed in the South, and that as a region it lagged behind United States per capita value-added average in 1860 by a substantial seven dollars, falling behind even the undeveloped Midwest.
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