Instead, the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century had realized Alexander Hamilton's dream of an industrial and commercial nation led by a business elite of bankers, merchants, and entrepreneurs. A leader of the Federalist party, which advocated a strong central government, Hamilton also believed that the nation's wealthiest individuals should have the greatest stake in that government in order to secure their loyalty and tap their good judgment.
Indeed, as the new capitalist order emerged, workers' advocates complained that government was creating institutions that bestowed special privileges on the wealthy few: State legislatures controlled the right to form a chartered corporation, enabling influential businessmen and politicians to monopolize various sectors of the economy, from banking and insurance to infrastructure, transportation, and manufacturing. A huge variety of paper money issued by the proliferating state-chartered banks provided a medium of exchange for the growing economy, and to maintain some control over the state banks, in 1816, the federal government chartered a second Bank of the United States; Hamilton had originally conceived of this privately owned entity in which the U.S. Treasury deposited its funds.6
By the late 1820s and early 1830s, a bitter backlash against the elite monopolists was spearheaded by Jefferson's political heirs in the Democratic party of President Andrew Jackson. They rallied both urban workers of the Northeast and small farmers from the upper South and lower Midwest—the disaffected fringes of the expanding market economy—to denounce the idle bankers and speculators who grew rich by manipulating the "producing classes," those who created value and wealth through "honest labor." When Jackson vetoed a new charter for the Bank of the United States in 1832, pro-Bank forces called him a tyrant and themselves the Whigs, after the opponents of King George III in the Revolutionary era. The Whigs carried on the traditions of the recently disbanded Federalists in the American two-party system.7
Jackson owned slaves, and while he and his followers decried inequality between the rich and poor, they believed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Indeed, the enslavement of African Americans was a pillar of the Jacksonians' master race philosophy: All whites, no matter how rich or poor, as citizens of the Republic and members of the master race, were equal. The most humble white was considered superior to any black.
The Democrats' inclusive and unabashed declaration of white supremacy helped to win over unskilled workers in the Northeast, including Irish immigrants, as well as the Butternuts—struggling farmers of southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois nicknamed for the butternut tree oil they used to dye their clothing. White supremacy became a consolation in poverty, and a promise of upward mobility for those who would grasp it.8
The smoldering political and class conflict of the Jacksonian era—infused with racial, ethnic, and religious hatreds—triggered riots in American cities with grim regularity in the decades before the Civil War, particularly in New York, where the authorities responded with steadily diminishing tolerance and increasing force.
Mayor Opdyke's panic about the absence of the militia during Lee's invasion, and Governor Seymour's resolve to get them back within thirty days, reflected an awareness that these state troops had increasingly become New York City's bulwark against civil disorder when riots raged out of control and overwhelmed the police. During the militiamen's absence in the first half of July 1863, the city faced a more immediate threat from the festering resentments of its own inhabitants than it did from Lee's army.9
The three-hundred-dollar exemption clause meant the government "was taking practically the whole number of soldiers called for out of the laboring classes," wrote journalist Joel Tyler Headley. "A great proportion of these being Irish, it naturally became an Irish question . . . It was in their eyes the game of hated England over again—oppression of Irishmen." The British had invaded and colonized Ireland centuries earlier, imposing harsh Protestant rule over the Catholic majority. Immigration to America provided new opportunities for the Irish but not an escape from anti-Catholic hostility.10*
Since the American colonies were founded largely by Protestant refugees and explorers, the dominant native culture was Protestant; anti-Catholic sentiment and demonstrations were common. Pope Day celebrations featured effigies of the pope, the devil, and the Pretender, which were linked in an unholy trinity.† Protestants regarded the pope and the entire Catholic Church hierarchy as corrupt and a barrier to the direct experience of faith. While rioting in the colonial era had been confined largely to this kind of ritualistic street theater, as the number of Irish immigrants increased, they added a new twist by responding with violence. On St. Patrick's Day in 1799, teenage boys taunted Irish residents while marching through New York City's slums with grotesque straw-filled effigies of the saint, known as Paddies. The Irish, raised in a culture of constant resistance to the British, attacked the marchers, and one man was killed in the ensuing melee.
Threats against a Catholic church on Christmas Day in 1806 sparked a much larger clash in New York which left one man dead and dozens seriously injured, after Irishmen armed with clubs, rocks, and bricks—along with a bayonet and a stiletto—attacked the city's night watchmen, who had tried to disperse them.
On July 12, 1824, a bloody riot broke out in New York between Catholics and Orangemen—Irish Protestants—who were publicly celebrating the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, in which William of Orange defeated Ireland's Catholics in 1690. The watchmen arrested thirty-three Irish Catholics and not a single Orangeman. Thomas Addis Emmet, an Irish emigre and prominent attorney in the city, won the acquittal of the Catholics in a high-profile trial.11
Irish American immigrant leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, had been building ties to the Protestant establishment in an attempt to ease the Irish sense of isolation. Emmet and fellow Protestant William Sampson, both leading attorneys in the city, had emigrated after the abortive United Irishmen revolt in 1798. Along with William James MacNeven, a Catholic doctor, they launched the nonsectarian Association of the Friends of Ireland in New-York, which raised money for Daniel O'Connell's nonviolent campaign to abolish anti-Catholic laws in Ireland and the struggle for Catholics' civil rights in England which succeeded in 1829. The Shamrock, or Hibernian Chronicle, the city's first Irish American newspaper, was founded in 1810 and gave voice to these exiles' desire to assimilate in New York and unite Catholics and Protestants in a single Irish American community.
However, when Irish immigration increased in the late 1820s and early 1830s, working-class Irish Catholics rejected these efforts. The ties these leaders had fostered within the Irish population—and between the Catholic working class and the city's Protestant establishment—began to fray. Catholic laborers, trapped in the slums and lectured by scornful, Bible-pushing Protestant missionaries, flocked instead to new publications and fraternal organizations that affirmed their ethnic and religious identity. The Catholic archdiocese added new churches across the city to accommodate the influx of immigrants and exuded a new self-confidence in its dealings with the Protestant majority in New York, challenging anti-Catholic language in the public school curriculum and building its own parochial schools.12
This strengthening of the Catholic archdiocese coincided with the arrival of numerous Protestant evangelists from New England, including Charles Finney, whose wildly popular revival meetings helped intensify religious divisions in New York. Finney's work was part of the Second Great Awakening, a surge in Protestant revivalism radiating from New England to New York and across northern Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana during the first few decades of the nineteenth century.13
Many Protestants viewed the growth of the New York archdiocese, along with the emancipation of Irish and British Catholics in 1829, as a grave threat and launched a frenzy of antipapal activity in both countries in the coming years. British anti-Catholic propaganda arrived in New York, where public meetings, pamphlets, and entire newspapers were devoted to warding off the foreign menace of "Popery." Anxious Protestants d
eclared that since the pope had dictatorial power within the Catholic Church and warm relations with monarchs across Europe, Catholic immigrants must be the entering wedge of a conspiracy to bring down America's democratic government.14*
Surrounded by prejudice, most Irish Catholics in America were nonetheless better off economically and politically than they had been in Ireland, where the religious caste system imposed by Britain gave the lowliest Protestant more civil rights than any Catholic. Determined to improve their lot in America, the Irish made the most of the racial caste system they saw all around them, which was buttressed by the Democratic party.
In order to distinguish and distance themselves from African Americans at the bottom of the social ladder, Irish craftsmen and longshoremen formed trade unions and welcomed other ethnic groups, but not blacks. Irish workers insisted on segregated workplaces—on the docks and in factories—and threatened to quit as a group if a single black was hired. Having once been the "blacks of Europe," the Irish insisted on their membership in the white race, which at least gave their men the right to vote, ensuring that Democratic politicians would court them with favors.15
Blacks had only to meet a minimal property requirement to vote in New York after the Revolution, but when the Democrats came to power in New York State in 1801 with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the White House, they proceeded to contest the qualifications of blacks attempting to vote. In 1821, the Democrats saw to it that the new state constitution eliminated the property requirement for white men while raising it prohibitively—to $250—for blacks.16*†
However, statewide emancipation of black slaves in New York in 1827, set in motion earlier by the Federalists, added to white laborers' worries by blurring the distinction they sought to highlight. For the Irish slum dweller in particular, maintaining his whiteness was an uphill battle. Bigots referred to the Irish as "niggers turned inside out" and to blacks as "smoked Irish." In this vein, the Irish were often despised as shiftless loafers and drunks, and the Irish "race" was characterized as "low-browed, savage, bestial, wild, and simian," the same terms used to justify the enslavement of blacks as a race, and marshaled by nativists trying to deprive poor white immigrants of their right to vote.17
In New York, racial segregation existed in almost every facet of city life, including religion, education, employment, transportation, and politics, but there were no large black ghettoes, and a mixing of the races had been going on for years in the city's poorest neighborhoods. While segregation prevailed in most of the city's public facilities, impoverished tenants, black and white, often lived in the same building or the same apartment because they had no choice.18‡
Irishwomen also chose freely to marry black men, and their mulatto children were a common sight in the slums. In New York, racial integration was most evident in Five Points, the city's worst slum, named for the five-cornered intersection of Park, Worth, and Baxter Streets.* The area housed more than half of the city's black residents, along with a heavy concentration of Irish Americans, who, more than any other white group, lived with or right next to blacks. Five Points' bars and brothels offered both black and white prostitutes to customers of all races, and black underworld figures had white wives and girlfriends. Black competition for white women, like black competition in the workplace, tended to stoke the rage of the white male laborer, whose economic power was eroded by industrialization and who found his social and sexual status reduced as well, especially if he could not afford an apartment in which to raise a family.19
A dispirited immigrant wrote home to Dublin that the condition of the Irish in America was "one of shame and poverty. They are shunned and despised . . . 'My master is a great tyrant,' said a negro lately, 'he treats me as badly as if I was a common Irishman.' "20
Blacks, in turn, were furious that recent immigrants could vote as soon as they were naturalized and faced no property requirements. One African American complained that upstanding, educated blacks were "deprived of privileges granted to European paupers, blacklegs and burglars!!!"21 Statewide emancipation on July 4, 1827, did not mean political equality: "Alas! the freedom to which we have attained is defective," declared the Reverend Peter Williams Jr. In New York City, he lamented, it was still true that "the rights of men are decided by the colour of their skin."22 Williams led a large congregation of free, middle-class blacks, many of whom were active in fighting racial inequality in the North.23†
Making ethnic and racial tensions worse, just when New York's newly freed blacks were entering the job market, and when nativist, anti-Catholic sentiment was on the rise, the British government removed all legal barriers to emigration, and more than twenty thousand Irish left for America in 1827. In less than a decade, more than thirty thousand Irish were settling each year in New York City alone. While the city had received Irish immigrants throughout its history, unlike earlier arrivals, these were mostly Catholics. Notably, most were also penniless young men without skills who ended up living in the worst slums, like Five Points. The immigrants were thus poised to clash not only with Protestants but also with blacks in a contest for menial jobs.24
Some Protestants advertised jobs with the warning that "Irishmen need not apply" or "any country or color except Irish." Nonetheless, the new waves of Irish immigrants soon displaced blacks from many of the unskilled jobs to which whites had restricted them—as day laborers, dockworkers, domestics, and coachmen. Outside the cities, the Irish were soon mining coal, digging canals, and laying railroad tracks. Blacks in New York City clung to the fringes of the labor market as waiters, barbers, cooks on ships, farmhands, and oystermen.25*
However, resentment went both ways: The Irish blamed the presence of blacks in the North for driving down wages. Labor competition soon turned into racial warfare. Beginning in 1828, race riots plagued Philadelphia for twelve years and then continued sporadically until after the Civil War. In Cincinnati, in 1829, a white mob rampaged for three days against black residents and their property, leaving a trail of death and destruction. In the wake of the pogrom, most of the city's two thousand blacks left on foot for Canada.26
Racial conflict also accompanied the growth of the abolition movement. Inspired by the Second Great Awakening, New England Protestants were denouncing the sin of slavery. Black leaders were also becoming more outspoken and sending shock waves through New York City. They called for the immediate abolition of slavery—the confiscation of slaves from their owners— not the gradual schemes that had been used in the North.† With their white associates, they began turning New York into a center of the abolition movement.27
In 1827, Samuel Cornish, John Russwurm, Peter Williams Jr., and others started Freedom s Journal, the nation's first African American newspaper.‡ "African slavery is the deepest darkest crime that ever shaded the character of a nation," an editorial in the paper declared. "Despotic governments blush for its existence—what ought a free people to feel when they look upon the inhuman traffic in human flesh, which is every day going on in the public markets, in our own country?"28
Cornish's editorials and Williams's speeches caught the attention of Arthur Tappan, an affluent silk merchant transplanted from New England in 1815. A white evangelical Protestant, Tappan identified both with these black ministers' religious convictions and with their middle-class message of education and self-help. The advanced abolitionist views of the black clergymen influenced the movement's white leadership.29
William Lloyd Garrison, who launched an abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, in Boston in 1831, joined Tappan in withdrawing support for colonization—resettling ex-slaves in Liberia and elsewhere outside the United States. Garrison also condemned the Constitution of the United States for its protection of slavery, calling it a corrupt "bargain and compromise" and a pact with the devil. He publicly burned a copy of the document at a Fourth of July picnic. Charles Finney, the nation's leading Protestant evangelist, regarded slavery as a major obstacle to America's spiritual salvation and encouraged Tappan's abolitionist e
ndeavors.
Tappan enlisted the help of Cornish, Williams, and the black clergyman Theodore Wright, along with white Protestant ministers—some of them outspoken anti-Catholic bigots—to form an interracial organization, the New York Anti-Slavery Society. To emphasize the groundswell of anti-slavery opinion worldwide, the group timed their first meeting, in October 1833, to coincide with Parliament's abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.30*
Colonization advocates warned that freed southern slaves would flood New York, and "amalgamation," the mixing of the races, would pollute the pure blood of America's patrician families. They rallied a large mob to break up the first meeting of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, but its members had already sped through their agenda and escaped out the back of the building.
Not only had the local antislavery forces established themselves in New York, but two months later they made the city a center of the national abolition movement, shifting its focus away from Garrison and his followers in Boston: In December 1833, blacks and whites collaborated to create the American Anti-Slavery Society—a national organization with its headquarters on Nassau Street and its leadership consisting entirely of New York residents, including Arthur Tappan and his brother Lewis, other white merchants, and the black clergymen Cornish, Wright, and Williams.
For white merchants who had business dealings with the South, and favored colonization, this was an alarming development. Not only were their trading relationships threatened by the abolitionists' assault on slave owners' property rights, but the new antislavery organizations were chipping away at segregation in New York, placing blacks in leadership roles and welcoming them into white churches. It was little comfort to segregationists that blacks sat in separate pews; they saw their nightmare scenario of racial amalgamation springing to life.31
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