USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 12
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Boston Finance Committee, Auditor's Report, 1848, no. 36, p. 3; Massachu- setts Sanitary Commissioners, Report, 203.
85 Cf. Massachusetts Commissioners of Alien Passengers and Foreign Paupers, Report, 1854 (Boston, 1855), 22 ff .; Massachusetts House Documents, 1851, no.
I23
THE PHYSICAL ADJUSTMENT
mittees of the legislature only suggested minor reforms and palliatives to deal with the added load to the budget. The Commonwealth finally cut the Gordian knot by taking the administration into its own hands. In accordance with the recommendation of the Committee of 1851, it provided four
CHART D STATE PAUPERS IN MASSACHUSETTS, 1837-1858
14000
12000
10000
8000
6000
4000
Paypers
with
legal
settlement
Irish
English state
and paupers
2000
Foreign state
born pappers
0
1837 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
50 51 52
53 54
55
56 57 58
* Derived from "Report of the Special Joint Committee Appointed to Investigate Public Charitable Institutions of Massachusetts .... 1858," Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1858, no. 2. pp. 131, 143.
workhouses where its wards could be at least partially self- sustaining, and, in addition, it imposed a commutation tax by which immigrants paid for the support of their unfortunate countrymen who became public charges.86
However, the crux of the matter lay not in the question of
152, pp. 4, 5. Cf. also Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1859, no. 2; Massa- chusetts Senate Documents, 1839, no. 47, pp. 10, 13 ff .; Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1844, no. 44.
86 Robert W. Kelso, History of Public Poor Relief in Massachusetts, 1620-1920 (Boston, 1922), 136; Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1852, no. 127; Massa- chusetts Commissioners of Alien Passengers and Foreign Paupers, Report, 1851 (Boston, 1852), 3, 6. For the nativities of admissions to the workhouses, cf. Dissertation Copy, 467.
124
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
the agency to bear the expense, but in the fact that the indigents necessarily increased despite efforts to exclude or disown them. For poverty was an essential attribute of the city's economy. The system that begot a numerous proletariat perpetually on the verge of destitution, produced impoverishment as a matter of course upon the slightest slackening of the human or industrial machine. Mayor Quincy in 1848 and Mayor Bigelow in 1850 both expressed concern over the problem; but neither could do anything to cope with it. Under pressure of the exploited Irish, the cost of poor relief expanded mon- strously year after year.87
The impact of Irish pauperism on the city was slight in com- parison with the effects upon the immigrants themselves; for degradation by poverty was almost inevitable under the cir- cumstances of Irish life in Boston. New conditions dissolved the old ties, habits, and traditions with which they were in- compatible. The mores of the peasant farm could not readily be adapted to the tenement and the old adjustments that for many years had limited the social consequences of destitution in Ireland were inadequate in urban Boston. In this society want became a malignant and resourceful adversary; it in- sinuated itself into personal habits, perverting human relations and warping conceptions of right and wrong. Wherever it appeared, it encouraged intemperance, crime, and prostitution.88
Nothing the Irish found in Boston altered their tradition of alcoholic indulgence. Instead, crowded conditions drove men out of their homes into bars where they could meet friends, relax, and forget their anguish in the promised land. In 1846
87 Cf. Inaugural Addresses of the Mayors of Boston ... (Boston, 1894), I, 363, 385. Table III, infra, shows the rapid increase of the cost of poor relief after 1847 and particularly after 1850 when the city began to take up the burden of the support of former state paupers. Until then the cost had scarcely risen (cf. also, supra, 22). All available indices point to the Irish as the cause of this growth. Outdoor relief was concentrated in Irish wards. The Irish were the largest components of the state poorhouse population and a great majority of all paupers in the city and its suburbs after 1845 were Irish (cf. infra, Table XXI) .
Cf. Theodore Parker, Sermon of the Moral Condition of Boston . . . (Bos- ton, 1849), 15, 18, 19.
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THE PHYSICAL ADJUSTMENT
there were 850 liquor dealers in the city, but by 1849 fully 1,200 groggeries were open for the flourishing trade. A survey by the city marshal in November, 1851, showed the great majority of these to be Irish, and almost half to be concen- trated in the North End and Fort Hill.89 In addition, numerous Irish families sold gin as a sideline, without license, to cater to the demands of their countrymen. Frequently drunk and often jailed for inebriety, the Irish "arrested and turned back" the short-lived temperance movement which had made promis- ing progress up to their arrival.90 Other nationalities, particu- larly the Germans, were also fond of the glass, but neither their habits nor environment encouraged or even tolerated excessive drinking.
Frequent intoxication led to the Irish reputation for crim- inality.91 This impression actually derived from minor mis- demeanors generally committed under the influence of drink, - misdemeanors which in many cases might have earned for more affluent offenders only a tolerant reprimand. Compara- tively few Irishmen were guilty of more serious felonies. Negroes, whose transgressions frequently consisted of thefts of coal or wood, suffered from the same prejudice.92 There were, of course, a few notorious cases involving crimes of vio- lence, such as the trial for murder of the Negro, William Roby, but they were no more typical than Dr. Webster was of Har- vard professors.93 In no group was there an inherent predilec- tion for crime, but among the Irish the combination of poverty
89 Cf. Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, Twelfth Annual Report, 15; Parker, op. cit., 15; Massachusetts Sanitary Commission, Report, 203 ; Fifteenth Annual Report of the Executive Committee, Benevolent Fraternity of Churches (Boston, 1849), 6, 33; Harbor Excursion and Intemperance in Boston (Boston, 1853),8.
90 Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, Twelfth Annual Report, 11, 15; Shat- tuck, Report ... Census of Boston . . . 1845, 126.
91 For relative statistics of criminality, cf. infra, Tables XXII-XXIV.
92 Cf. Boston Pilot, February 2, 1856, March 3, 1855; Irish American, Septem- ber 12, 1857; African Repository, July, 1826, II, 152 ff.
93 For Roby, cf. Dissertation Copy, 224; for Doctor Webster, cf. Marjoribanks, op. cit., 179 ff .; A. B. Hart, Commonwealth History of Massachusetts (New York, 1930), IV, 56.
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
and intemperance created a maladjustment expressed by petty infractions of the rules of a society strange to them.
Standing "in false relations to nearly everything about them strangers in a strange land [,] surrounded by circum- stances novel to them, met by customs to which they [could] travagant and wild," the Irish necessarily became "involved in . not adapt themselves, influenced by motives often ex- harrassing doubt and perplexity." Their bewildered position in the city, together with overdrinking and the ill health of the slums, contributed to the rapid increase of insanity among them.94 In 1764 the Selectmen had rejected Thomas Hancock's bequest for the relief of idiots because they were too few to justify special attention; and although, in the next eighty years, both state and municipality found it necessary to make provisions for the care of the mentally sick, before the coming of the Irish the problem was neither financially nor medically serious. Thereafter the number of patients and the cost of at- tending them rose rapidly. Massachusetts expanded its facil- ities by building two new hospitals and Boston erected an asylum of its own, largely to care for Irish laborers, for among other groups the incidence of lunacy was much lower.95
Finally, there was some prostitution among Irish immigrant women whose wages from ordinary employment did not "supply them with the necessities . . . of life." 96 Irish girls at one time enjoyed the reputation of comparative freedom from this vice, and indeed very few were guilty of it; but by 1860 illegiti- mate births were probably more frequent among them than among any other nationality.97 The exigencies of the new
94 Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Trustees of the State Lunatic Hospital at Worcester, October, 1858, Massachusetts Public Documents, 1858, no. 27, p. 20. 95 Cf. William I. Cole, "Boston's Insane Hospital," New England Magazine, February, 1899, XIX, 753; Boston Finance Committee, Report of the City Auditor, 1864, no. 52, p. 263; "Abstract of the Returns from Overseers of the Poor," Massachusetts Public Documents, 1848, I; Boston Finance Committee, Auditor's Report, 1856, no. 44, p. 219; infra, Table XXV; Dissertation Copy, 460.
96 Cf. Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1871, 207.
97 Cf. Daily Evening Transcript, August 9, 1831; Massachusetts Secretary of State, "Registry and Return of Births, Marriages and Deaths . . . 1858," no. 16,
I27
THE PHYSICAL ADJUSTMENT
society had driven many into a course completely alien to their background and training.
Indeed, in adjusting to the relentless drive of harsh, uncon- trollable forces, the immigrants changed in many ways; and, in the changing, transformed the old Boston. The gap between the quiet suburban life of early South Boston and the bustling industrialism pervading it after 1850 was no greater than that between the Irishmen who turned their backs upon the placid fields of Kerry and those who tended the clamorous Bay State forges. Green meadows and heavy orchards gave way to dark rolling mills, and bronzed peasants turned into pallid hands whose sun shone from out the roaring hearth of the furnace. City and newcomer both felt the workings of the same force, the inevitable adaptation of new tenants to an old society. Each suffered a thoroughgoing physical metamorphosis, even- tually reflected in an equally complete change in character and thought, and leaving in its wake the necessity for a radically different cultural orientation.
Massachusetts Public Documents, 1858, no. 1, pp. 177 ff .; ibid., 1859, no. 17, Massachusetts Public Documents, 1859, no. I, p. 23 ; ibid., 1860, no. 18, Massa- chusetts Public Documents, 1860, no. I, p. 25.
CHAPTER V
CONFLICT OF IDEAS
As long . .. as the traditions of one's national and local group remain unbroken, one remains so attached to its customary ways of thinking that the ways of thinking which are perceived in other groups are regarded as curiosities, errors, ambiguities, or heresies. At this stage one does not doubt either the cor- rectness of one's own traditions of thought or the unity and uniformity of thought in general.1
BY 1845 Boston's cultural development had reached a point of close contact with the highest aspects of European civilization. Native Bostonians regarded England as the "mother country." They were proud of their British ancestry and remained "solidly and steadily English, settled down into an English mold and hardened into it." 2 But they had also learned to "expect an importation of the opinions and manners of the old countries" and to "receive from Europe a considerable part of [their] intellectual persuasions and moral tastes. . . . " 3 Newcomers, be they English, French or German, originating from similar backgrounds, and facing few problems of physical or economic adjustment, could participate in a cosmopolitan society on terms of direct and simple equality. For these came prepared to share the world of the Boston merchants - their music and literature, their ideas and politics, their rationalism and their all-pervading optimism. Whatever differences existed were in degree and pace, easily reconcilable.
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia . .. (London, 1936), 6.
2 Cf. Grattan to Palmerston, June 15, 1850, British Consular Correspondence, F.O. 5/350; Cork Examiner, November 7, 1856; Ralph Waldo Emerson, "English Traits," Collected Works (Boston, 1903), V; Edward Everett, Orations and Speeches ... (Boston, 1850), II, 429 ff., 462 ff .; Edward Dicey, Six Months in the Federal States (London, 1863), II, 180.
Cf. Ezra S. Gannett, Arrival of the Britannia, a Sermon . . . Federal Street Meeting-House ... July 19, 1840 ... (Boston, 1840), 16, 17; cf. also, supra, 26 ff.
129
CONFLICT OF IDEAS
The Irish who settled in Boston, however, were products of a milieu completely isolated from the intellectual influences of London, Paris, or even Dublin. And every phase of their experience in America heightened the disparity between their heritage and that of their neighbors. The physical barriers segregating them from the dominant cultural currents of the day disappeared in the New World; but the spiritual ones crossed the Atlantic in the hold of every immigrant ship. Re- affirmed and strengthened by the difficulties of the new en- vironment, these restraints ruled Irish thoughts as vigorously in Boston as in Cork.
In Ireland, a circumscribed agrarian economy gave form to their ideas, to the "implicit . . . assumptions, or . . . un- conscious mental habits" dominating their thoughts.4 In the bitter atmosphere of poverty and persecution, the Irish had found little in life that was not dark and nothing that was hopeful. Their utter helplessness before the most elemental forces fostered an immense sadness, a deep-rooted pessimism about the world and man's role in it, manifested even "on occa- sions of great joy and merriment ... in grief and melan- choly. . . " 5
Nor was this feeling modified in the transit to the New World. Irishmen fled with no hope in their hearts - degraded, humiliated, mourning reluctantly-abandoned and dearly-loved homes. From the rotting immigrant hulks, they nostalgically joined the local poet in plaintive farewell:
Farewell to thee, Erin mavourneen, Thy valleys I'll tread never more; This heart that now bleeds for thy sorrows, Will waste on a far distant shore. Thy green sods lie cold on my parents, A cross marks the place of their rest, -
4 For a definition of ideas in this sense, cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, a Study of the History of an Idea ... (Cambridge, 1936), 7 and Chapter I.
Robert Bell, Description of the Conditions and Manners . . of the Peas- antry of Ireland . . (London, 1804), 17.
130
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
The wind that moans sadly above them, Will waft their poor child to the West.6
The old homeland grew lush in their memories when compared with the miseries of constricted tenement districts and the hopelessness of the arbitrary factory economy. They found good cause to complain :
I am tired, fatigued, weary, Of this never ending strife - Of the journey, lone and dreary, On the darksome path of life.7
Filthy homes, wretched working conditions, and constant hun- ger mocked the merchants' optimism, and bred, instead, the identical pessimism in Boston as in Ireland. On both sides of the Atlantic, Irish experience generated a brooding recognition that human relationships were transient, subject to the ever- threatening intervention of impersonal evils. Their essential pessimism was reflected in the prominent role of the devil in their literature and even in the belief in retributive justice at the hands of a deus ex machina as compensation in a basically evil world. Both as peasants whose anxious livelihood derived from the capricious soil, and as cogs in an unpredictable indus- trial machine, they were victims of incalculable influences be- yond their control. Untimely disaster, even death, was normal, a part of life accepted without need for explanation.8
Buffeted about in a hostile universe by malevolent forces more powerful than themselves, Irish peasants could turn only to religion for consolation. The drama of salvation unfolded at every mass became a living reality from which emerged dogmas held with a tenacity beyond secular reason. Man's fall through original sin and his deliverance by grace were not theological abstractions but insistent realities reflected in all the features of their everyday existence.
6 "Izzie," "The Emigrant's Farewell," Boston Pilot, August 16, 1862.
7 P.L., "I Am Tired," Boston Pilot, March 26, 1864.
8 Cf. the analysis of Irish newspaper literature, Dissertation Copy, 231-233.
I3I
CONFLICT OF IDEAS
When we luck at him there, we see our blissed Saviour, stripped a'most naked lake ourselves; whin we luck at the crown i'thorns on the head, we see the Jews mockin' him, jist the same as - some people mock ourselves for our religion; whin we luck at his eyes, we see they wor niver dry, like our own; whin we luck at the wound in his side, why we think less of our own wounds an' bruises, we get 'ithin and 'ithout, every day av our lives.9
To those who bore more than their share of hardships, religion's most valued assurance was its promise that "the world did not explain itself" and that man met his true destiny not in this constantly frustrating universe, but in the loftier sphere it preceded.1ยบ Earthly affairs, life itself, were insig- nificant and death was but a release for the tremendous process of redemption.11 Preparation for that rebirth thoroughly eclipsed the affairs of the immediate present, engendering an attitude of complete acceptance toward mundane problems so long as salvation was unthreatened.12
Against the immense forces facing men, reason and science counted for nothing. The Irish scorned the independent ra- tionalism basic to the religious feelings of other Bostonians, and discouraged "reading the bible and putting one's own con- struction upon it" or allowing "every tinker and ploughboy to interpret scripture as he thought proper." 13 The approval of the hierarchy reinforced this attitude. The pastoral letter of the American bishops in 1843 pointed out that "without faith it is impossible to please God" and warned against "preferring in the least point the dictates of your erring reason." 14
9 Kathleen Kennedy in "Cross and Beads," Boston Catholic Observer, No- vember 8, 15, 1848.
10 Boston Pilot, August 12, 1854. Compare the English industrial background of Methodism in J. L. and Barbara Hammond, Town Labourer, 1760-1832 . . . (London, 1920), 276.
Thus, at the death of Mrs. Halloran's child, her priest inwardly "rejoiced that another soul was about being housed from life's tempests" (Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey, "Nora Brady's Vow," Boston Pilot, March 7, 1857).
12 Cf. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Orestes A. Brownson, a Pilgrim's Progress (Boston, 1939), 205.
13 Cf. Boston Pilot, September 9, 1854; United States Catholic Intelligencer, February 24, 1832; Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel, July 19, 1834.
14 Boston Pilot, June 10, 1843.
I32
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
The true guardian of the faith essential to salvation was the Catholic Church. Two centuries of violent attack in Ireland had strengthened and confirmed its position; for national and economic issues had fused with the religious in opposition to landlords who were at once masters, aliens, and representatives of a hostile faith.15 Beliefs maintained at great personal sacri- fice were not lightly held, and among those who came to America the Church gained particular prestige, for it was one of the few familiar institutions that followed them across the Atlantic.
In the New World as in the Old, Catholicism assumed a distinctive cast from the background of its adherents. Uni- versal rather than national in organization, and catholic in essential dogma, it nevertheless partook of the quality of the men who professed it; for the nature of the milieu modified even religious doctrines, particularly in their application to the problems of secular life. Irish priests and theologians rose from the ranks of the people, surrounded by popular influences which inevitably affected their later work. The continuous process of clerical adjustment to the ideas of those they served intensified Irish devoutness in America, because the conclu- sions Catholicism derived from its theology coincided with the ideas emanating from the inner circumstances of the peasant- laborer's life.
The confidence of the Irish confirmed the Church's para- mount position in their own affairs; church doctrine extended this ascendancy over all man-made institutions, including the state, and urged that
Religious liberty means, not religious slavery, not simply the liberty of infidelity, the liberty to deny and blaspheme, but . .. that religion herself is free . . . to be herself, and to discharge her functions in her own way, without let or hindrance from the State. . .. Who asserts the freedom of religion asserts the subjection of the State. Religion represents the Divine Sovereignty ... in the affairs of
15 Cf. Edward MacLysaght, Irish Life in the Seventeenth Century . . . (Lon- don, 1939), 283-285, 288 ff.
I33
CONFLICT OF IDEAS
men; the State. . .. merely ... human sovereignty. Is the Divine Sovereignty higher than the human . . . ? Then is religion . . . higher than the State. . . . religion overrides all other sovereigns, and has the supreme authority over all the affairs of the world. . . . This is a terrible doctrine to atheistical politicians, infidels, and anarchists; and hence . .. they are the enemies . . . of religious liberty. . . . 16
Since the "freedom of religion" was "its sovereignty" and since "to assert its independence of the State" was "to assert its supremacy over the State," secular government had merely to choose between particular measures within the limits of re- ligious precepts, to which it must conform, and in conforming, compel its subjects to conform.17 In defense of this position Catholics argued that
Christianity is "part and parcel of the law of the land." .. . We are professedly a Christian State, and acknowledge ourselves bound by the law of nature as interpreted and re-enacted by Christianity.18
There could be no true tolerance, for, no matter what their professed beliefs, all citizens must ultimately comply with the basic tenets of the "true religion" through its temporal agency, the state. This opinion forced a denial of
the liberty of each man to be of what religion he pleases, or of none a low and an altogether inadequate view. . . . merely a polit- ical ... not a religious right at all; for no religion that has any self- respect can acknowledge that one has the right to be of any religion he chooses. No man has or can have a religious or a moral right to be of any religion but the true religion. ... Every religion by its very nature is intolerant of every other, and condemns itself, if it is not.19
16 Boston Catholic Observer, March 29, 1848; cf. also Boston Pilot, Jan- uary 22, 1853.
17 Boston Catholic Observer, April 5, 1848; cf. also Brownson's description of Charlemagne as an ideal Catholic ruler (Boston Pilot, December 4, 1852), and the peasant conception of the priest who ruled the Irish village both as priest and lawgiver (Allen H. Clington, "Frank O'Donnell. A Tale of Irish Life," ibid., January 24, 1863).
18 Boston Catholic Observer, March 22, 1848.
19 Ibid., March 29, 1848.
I34
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
Any deviation from this concept of "religious freedom" earned bitter condemnation as "latitudinarianism of the very worst sort." 20
The belief that non-Christians were "free to profess no por- tion of their religion which contravenes Christian morality" certainly contrasted with the native conviction, as set forth by Channing, that formal sectarian boundaries had little signif- icance. While most Bostonians felt, with John Adams, that "every honest, well-disposed, moral man, even if he were an atheist, should be accounted a Christian," Brownson insisted that "a Christian Protestant, is to the Catholic mind simply a contradiction in terms." 21 That disparity reflected a broad difference between the basic attitudes and unconscious pre- sumptions of the rational, progressive optimist and of the religious, conservative pessimist.
This dichotomy was most marked when expressed in terms of concrete attitudes toward the pressing social problems of the period. The mental set of tenement or seminary scarcely har- monized with the rational Bostonian's concept of reform as an infallible guide along the straight path of progress to ultimate perfectibility. Indeed the Irish were completely alien to the idea of progress and necessarily antagonistic "to the spirit of the age." 22 Reform was a delusion inflating men's sense of importance, distorting the relative significance of earthly values, and obscuring the true goals of their endeavor - salvation of the eternal soul. Such movements were suspect because they exaggerated the province of reason, exalting it above faith, futile because they relied upon temporal rather than spiritual
20 Cf., e.g., Brownson's criticism of the works of Cardinal Newman and of Bishop John England (Brownson to Father J. W. Cummings, Boston, Septem- ber 5, 1849 [Brownson Papers, MSS., L.U.N.D.]; Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson's Middle Life: from 1845 to 1855 [Detroit, 1899], 105; Schlesinger, op. cit., 199-201).
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