by Niall O'Dowd
Little wonder the Irish signed up for the Democratic Party in droves, seeking a job and a new start, which that party was offering to many off the boat.
Lincoln, in fact, correctly believed the slave issue to be of far more importance than ethnic strife, but the Irish, mindful of the rumors swirling around about his affinity for the Know-Nothings, kept their distance. It would take a civil war and inspired Irish leadership from Thomas Francis Meagher, Archbishop Hughes of New York, and others to bring them together.
It was not surprising, then, that Lincoln knew the Irish—he probably encountered more Irish personally than any other president, bar JFK. A million Irish had flooded in during the Famine years. In 1859, the entire population of the US was just twenty-three million, The Irish had a huge impact. Chicago, the nearest big city to Lincoln, had twenty percent of its population described as Irish. Springfield, home of his law office, too became an Irish hotbed.
John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s biographers who served him in the White House, described Springfield as Lincoln found it when he moved there.
“The town was built on the edge of the woods, the north side touching the timber, the south encroaching on the prairie… . [T]here were, of course, no pavements, or sidewalks; an attempt at crossings was made by laying down large chunks of wood. The houses were almost all wooden, and were disposed in rectangular blocks.”
A large square had been left in the middle of the town, in anticipation of future greatness, and when Lincoln began his residence, the work of clearing the ground for the new state house was already going forward. In one of the largest houses looking on the square, at the northwest corner, the county court had its offices, and other rooms in the building were let to lawyers. One of these was occupied by John Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner.
In Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield the Irish were becoming an important group, especially at election time. Lincoln would have problems with that.
CHAPTER SIX
Lincoln Takes an Axe Handle to the Irish
The first Irish immigrants to Springfield began arriving in the 1830s and were middle-to-upper class, according to a master’s thesis by Christopher Elliott Wallace that has been preserved in the Sangamon Valley Collection.
These early immigrants operated dry goods stores, inns, and sawmills. They were doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and politicians. But the greatest influx of immigrants from Ireland came in the mid-1840s, after blight killed off the potato crop. This was a different kind of Irish—malnourished, poor, and desperate for a new life.
The Irish headed for the major US cities with dreams of starting all over in America and grabbing their own sliver of the American dream. Springfield, a boomtown developing and expanding quickly, seemed a natural halting place for the Irish. About 87,000 made their way to Illinois.
Illinois became a state in 1818. In the 1830s and 1840s, the Irish and Germans came from New York and Boston by way of the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes or on the new National Road. They settled the central and northern counties and looked to a bright future. The railroad arrived in 1852. When Lincoln left for the White House in 1860, the population of Springfield was 10,000, about twenty percent of which were Irish.
But they were not welcome. The reception was cold, bordering on hatred. The established churches resented this new ethnicity and religion suddenly in their midst. “Intemperance, Sabbath-breaking and profanity all around,” was one description of the unwashed Irish by a local preacher.
The Irish lived cheek by jowl in a decrepit series of buildings on the north side of town, known as “Chicken Row.” Poverty bred bigotry and violence, and the Irish were often in the center of it. The Irish neighborhood was renamed “Battle Row.”
For an ambitious Republican politician like Lincoln, the Irish represented a real difficulty. Springfield had closely-contested elections and rumors of traveling Irish being brought in to vote were widespread. Emigrant Irish stuffing the ballot boxes was a reality in New York; Lincoln did not want to see it in Springfield. In his 1858 senatorial election, Lincoln was convinced he could win if Irish ballot stuffing was avoided.
“I now have a high degree of confidence that we shall succeed if we are not overrun with fraudulent votes to a greater extent than usual.” Lincoln claimed to have seen “Celtic gentlemen with their black carpet bags in their hands.”
“What I most dread,” he wrote, “is that they (the Democrats) will introduce into doubtful districts numbers of men who are legal voters in all respects save for residency. And will swear to residence and thus put it beyond our power to exclude him.”
He was especially referring to Irish railroad workers being drafted in to vote. Lincoln suggested infiltrating such groups and exposing them at the right moment as unlawful.
He was not wrong to be fearful. In the 1858 election, Senator Stephen Douglas had the full support of the railroad barons for his approval of their expansionist plans. The workers were mainly Irish. Noted Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo stated Lincoln feared railroad bosses “sending road gangs of Irish Catholics down the line, dropping them off in strategic districts days or weeks before the election to perform grading and repairs, and to turn up on Election Day to vote as though they were permanent residents.”
Lincoln knew the Irish community in his Springfield were immigrants striving to start a new life. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Lincoln never viewed all immigrants as the same. However, he much preferred the Germans, who were fleeing a failed revolution and who were better educated than the Irish. One of his closest German allies, Gustave Koerner, was a pallbearer at his funeral.
The German community was led in many key positions by highly-educated German 48ers, revolutionaries who had fomented a democratic revolution in Germany in 1848 and fled to America after that. Intellectual, educated, and driven by visions of democratic freedoms, they were obvious fellow travelers for Lincoln. The scruffy Irish, fleeing famine and persecution, had no such hold on the future president.
Yet his wisdom in refusing to stereotype and blacken the Irish came though when all around him, including his wife and law partner, happily vilified them, and Lincoln was still perfectly capable of separating the political issues he disagreed with them on from his innate concern for all underdogs, which was such a measure of his life. Why else would his domestic staff both in Springfield and in the White House be composed of so many Irish immigrants?
His notoriously anti-Irish law partner, Herndon, aided and abetted the negative sentiments, saying the rumors of imported Irishmen voting was “no humbug cry” and asking, “What shall we do? Shall we tamely submit to the Irish, or shall we arise and cut their throats? If blood is shed in Illinois to maintain the purity of the ballot box and the rights of the popular will, do not be at all surprised.”
A local newspaper, The Jacksonville Sentinel, took Lincoln to task for being anti-Irish. Though, in a strange context they accused him of being a “holy horror of all Irishmen and other adopted citizens who have sufficient self-respect to believe themselves superior to the Negro.”
Herndon relates a specific event where Lincoln was prepared to use violence against the Irish.
“Once in Springfield, the Irish voters meditated taking possession of the polls. News came down the street that they would permit nobody to vote but those of their own party.
“Mr. Lincoln seized an axe-handle from a hardware store and went alone to open the way to the ballot box.”
Lincoln was enormously strong, and his threat to fight was no idle one.
In the 1858 election, Senator Douglas was reelected to the Senate against Lincoln, but scholars agree the Irish vote was hardly the main factor. Much more important was the power of the incumbency role, which meant Douglas had the railroad barons and scores of favors and promises to dispense. He also had the Irish.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Irish, Douglass, and Lincoln in the 1860 Election
Famine-tossed, starving, and homeless when
they arrived, the Irish also faced incredible derision and hatred after they arrived on America’s teeming shore. But there was no going back.
The hatred was palpable. An editorial in The Chicago Tribune in 1855 stated, “Who does not know that the most depraved, debased, worthless, and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?”
Even Theodore Roosevelt stated in the 1880s that “the average Catholic Irishman of the first generation, as represented in the [New York State] Assembly [is a] low, venal, corrupt, and unintelligent brute.”
In Harper’s Weekly a few years earlier, it was stated, “Irishmen … have so behaved themselves that nearly seventy-five percent of our criminals and paupers are Irish; that fully seventy-five percent of the crimes of violence committed among us are the work of Irishmen; that the system of universal suffrage in large cities has fallen into discredit through the incapacity of the Irish for self-government.”
As Graydon Wilson, an Irish American expert noted, “In short, most Americans viewed Irish Catholics as people prone to violence, crime, corruption, drunkenness, and ignorance. They also viewed them as members of a church that was both wrong theologically and scheming to overthrow the American republic.”
Even the sainted freed black slave Frederick Douglass found fault, blaming drunkenness, not the British, for the flight of millions from Ireland.
Douglass, who once wrote, “I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country,” about his Irish visit, was likely reflecting his disappointment at the Irish American failure to heed Daniel O’Connell’s rallying cry against slavery in his open letter to Irish America.
The great Liberator, the outstanding Irishman of his generation, some would argue of any generation, was fearless in his condemnation of slavery.
In his “Address from the People of Ireland to their Countrymen and Countrywomen in America,” he made a spirited call to join the movement of William Garrison and Frederick Douglass, which was signed on to by 60,000 Irish.
“America is cursed by slavery!” it stated. “JOIN WITH THE ABOLITIONISTS EVERYWHERE! They are the only consistent advocates of liberty… . CLING BY THE ABOLITIONISTS.”
Yet the Irish in America were deeply suspicious. They had seen the deep strain of anti-Irishness and the birth of the Know-Nothing movement stem from those very same abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips and Elijah Lovejoy, who were naked in their anti-Catholic bias. William Garrison hated Catholicism and often wrote of the pope as the “Whore of Babylon.” Irish Catholics off the boat were always going to have difficulty supporting such men.
Historian Tom Chaffin notes that Douglass was in fact an Anglophile, grateful forever to Britain for banning slavery in 1833. Douglass was also ambivalent about Catholics, writing after watching a parade of Catholic seminarians in Rome that he was sad “that they are being trained to defend dogmas and superstitions contrary to the progress and enlightenment of the age.”
He had remarkably little insight into why the Irish were suffering and what was causing it. In a famous letter to William Garrison concerning his four-month sojourn in Ireland, he wrote, “The immediate, and it may be the main cause of the extreme poverty and beggary in Ireland, is intemperance. This may be seen in the fact that most beggars drink whiskey… . Drunkenness is still rife in Ireland. The temperance cause has done much—is doing much—but there is much more to do, and, as yet, comparatively few to do it.”
When a figure of such stature as Douglass had such mixed views on the Irish, it was hardly surprising that anti-Irish sentiment was cresting just at the time that Lincoln was taking to the national stage.
Lincoln himself, given his politics and the extreme views of men like his law partner Herndon, was remarkably affable about the Irish, even in private correspondence and conversation. But he could never match what Stephen Douglas, a Democrat, his chief opponent in 1858 for the senate and 1860 for the White House, provided to them—all-out support and attention at a time when they were reviled.
An important part of the Irish attraction to the Democratic Party was “The Little Giant,” Senator Stephen Douglas, whose career and Lincoln’s were forever entwined. They even sought the same woman, Mary Todd Lincoln, at one time.
Though born in Maine, Douglas had more of a natural-frontier, restless mindset. In 1833 he moved to Cleveland, then to Winchester, Illinois, where he worked as an itinerant schoolteacher before settling in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he was admitted to the bar. He wrote to his Vermont family, “I have become a Western man, have imbibed Western feelings, principles, and interests, and have selected Illinois as the favorite place of my adoption.”
During his stellar political career, Douglas believed slavery should be decided by popular sovereignty, effectively leaving it to each state to decide its own position.
The Irish liked Douglas, given he was their Democratic Party candidate. He courted their votes at a time when they were widely shunned, and did not hesitate to use the race card with them.
Douglas told one nakedly racist story to illustrate the dangers of siding with Lincoln. In the story, freed slave Frederick Douglass was reputed to have come to an Illinois town in a fancy carriage. The Republican owner of the carriage was forced to ride on top of the vehicle while Douglass and the rich man’s white wife and daughter rode inside.
“Black Republicans think that the Negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, and ride in a carriage with your wife, while you drive the team,” Stephen Douglas told his listeners. The message was clear: “‘Fred’ Douglass wants your white wife and daughters.”
As historian Patrick Young noted, “The specter of white men having to turn their wives over to freed black men and being forced to serve the freed slave, as the black slave had once been forced to serve the white man, was the image of abolition served daily in the Democratic press to their newly arrived immigrant readers.”
As his near-namesake Frederick Douglass noted, “The Irish people, warm-hearted, generous, and sympathizing with the oppressed everywhere, when they stand upon their own green island, are instantly taught, on arriving in this Christian country, to hate and despise the colored people.
“They are taught to believe that we eat the bread which of right belongs to them. The cruel lie is told the Irish, that our adversity is essential to their prosperity.”
Stephen Douglas took his initial 1837 congressional campaign against Lincoln’s law partner, John Stuart, into the Irish labor camps, where they were building the Michigan Canal project.
Whigs hooted that the Douglas idea of democracy meant having this diminutive figure (he was either five feet or five feet four, depending on reporting) addressing an Irish rabble about the importance of immigrants. Douglas was not above exaggeration either, saying he was Irish, descended from a long line of phantom McDouglasses. “I expect to get all the votes,” he dryly told a friend.
He did, and lost by only thirty-seven votes to John Stuart, Lincoln’s law partner, because of the Irish vote support. He learned to depend on them and deliver for them.
But most importantly, the Irish and other immigrant groups supported Douglas because the Whigs tried every available means to disenfranchise them since they were recent immigrants and known Democratic voters. The blacklisting of emigrants from voting effort was especially promoted by Lincoln’s then-party in Illinois.
Douglas fought tooth and nail to prevent that. He succeeded with a brilliant lawyerly maneuver before the Illinois Supreme Court, which saved the recent immigrant right to vote for at least two elections.
In the process, the “Little Giant” developed even closer links with the Irish. While he was not about to rally against the abolition of slavery in new states, he was perfectly prepared to defend immigrants and their right to vote and did so in brilliant fashion. He also visited them in their labor camps.
The Irish suffered dreadful conditions in those camps, as historian Allen Guelzo wrote. They
were disease-ridden, and safety standards were zero. Workers were only one injury away from complete destitution.
They were also vilified in Lincoln’s Midwest. The Chicago Tribune wrote that the Scandinavians, Germans, French, English, and Scotch would always “be counted on the side of free institutions.” The Irish, however, “have signally failed to comprehend the spirit of freedom.”
Protestant moralism mixed with Know-Nothing fervor on the Republican/Whig side, making it inevitable that the Democratic Party would provide the home for the Irish.
Douglas had also supported an Irish movement known as “Young America,” based on the radical Young Irelanders group who sparked insurrection in Ireland. The American group optimistically called for the US to intervene militarily in Sicily and Ireland to ensure their freedom. Douglas was all in.
He loved to tell stories about his Irish supporters and their enthusiasm for him. On the campaign trail for his first race for congressman in Illinois in 1837, Douglas spoke at an Irish rally for him in Joliet, Illinois, where hundreds of Irish worked on the canal. Most were recent immigrants, well aware of the vilification of their kind. In Douglas they had a defender and hero.
Douglas said, “I had an appreciative audience; they cheered me; in fact they were too friendly. I was extolling the patriotic nature of Ireland, the virtues of her people, the bravery of her sons, and beauty of her daughters. I even referred to myself as being descended from a long line of patriotic sires of Irish descent. When I had said that a great big burly Irishman over six feet high rose and said, ‘Do you say, Mr. Douglas, that you descended from the great McDouglasses of Ireland?’ I said yes … Spreading out his brawny arms, he said, ‘What a devil of a descent.’”