USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 13
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21 Cf. Boston Catholic Observer, March 28, 1848; Brownson, Works of Brown- son, I, 254; Schlesinger, op. cit., 28; James F. Clarke, The Church . . . as It Was ... (Boston, 1848), 20; Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past from the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston, 1883), 71 ; infra, 188 ff.
22 Cf., e.g., Boston Pilot, September 9, July 29, 1854.
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CONFLICT OF IDEAS
agencies, and dangerous because they undermined respect for established institutions.23
The failure of the Irish to comprehend fully the democratic feeling basic to reform intensified their hostility. Generations of enforced obedience bred a deep respect for class distinctions. Irishmen could scarcely have a firm appreciation of the equality of man when their very school books taught them
Q. If the poor will not try to be good, what will follow? A. That the rich will not help them.24
At best, this acquiescence developed into the feudal loyalty of retainer for master, but more frequently it became the complete servility described by Arthur Young:
A landlord ... can scarcely invent an order which a servant, laborer or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but un- limited submission. . . . A poor man would have his bones broken, if he offered to lift his hand in his own defense.25
In America, too, they agreed that everyone should "mate with their equals, high as well as low," and the Pilot pointed out that the poor Irish family was "much more happy and contented in its place in life" than the American.26 But Judith O'Rourke expressed this acceptance of class most clearly when, scoffing at the possibility of educating her children, she hoped that her sons would "grow up honest good men, like them that's gone afore them, not ashamed of their station, or honest toil," while her daughter " 'Il be the same lady her mother is . . . an'
23 Cf. J. W. Cummings, D. D., Social Reform, a Lecture ... (Boston, 1853), 18.
24 Questions and Answers Adapted to the Reading Lessons and the Stories in Mrs. Trimmer's Charity School Spelling Book, Part I ... (Dublin, 1814), Lesson fifth, II.
25 Quoted in F. Spencer Baldwin, "What Ireland Has Done for America," New England Magazine, March, 1901, XXIV, 73. Cf. also the character of Nora Brady, Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey, "Nora Brady's Vow," Boston Pilot, Jan- uary 3, 1857; also Constantia Maxwell, Country and Town in Ireland under the Georges (London, 1940), 55.
26 Boston Pilot, January 10, 1857, July 15, 1854.
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
that's good enough. ... She'd look purty I'm thinkin' wid her music in one corner an' I wid my wash tub in another." 27
Thus, the whole galaxy of reforms that absorbed New Eng- land in the thirty years after 1835 met the determined opposi- tion of the Irish Catholic population in Boston. Fundamental patterns of thought combined with group interests to turn them against their neighbors who "devoutly believe in any Woolly horse, any Kossuth, any Montes that may chance to come," and among whom "Freesoilerism, Millerism, Spiritual rappings, Mainea all are current." To follow such doctrines which had already "infected our whole society and turned a large portion of our citizens into madmen" was to become "a philanthropist a person who loves everybody generally and hates every- body particularly." 28
"Leading in majesty and peerless fidelity, the beautiful con- stellation of reforms," was abolition. Against slavery the finest spirits in Boston united in a movement which, after 1830, gained steadily in adherents until it dominated the city.29 Yet the Irish concertedly opposed the spread of "Niggerology." They sometimes recognized that slavery was abstractly bad, and sometimes denied it; but in any case, humanitarianism was as powerless to eradicate the institution as to deal with the other evils in which the world abounded.3º A number of prac- tical objections reinforced the theory that only the influence of the Church could counteract social maladies.31 The disruption of the Repeal Movement by O'Connell's anti-slavery speech
27 Cf. Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey, "Old Landlord's Daughter," Boston Pilot, Jan- uary 21, 1854.
28 Cf. Boston Pilot, April 24, October 16, 1852 ; Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 296.
20 Cf. Voice of Industry, January 7, 1848; Henry Steele Commager, Theo- dore Parker . (Boston, 1936), 151 ff .; A. B. Darling, Political Changes in Massachusetts . . . (New Haven, 1925), 153 ff .; A. B. Hart, Commonwealth History of Massachusetts ... (New York, 1930), IV, 324 ff.
30 Cf. E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence ... in the United States . . . (London, 1835), I, 159; Dissertation Copy, 242; Boston Pilot, January 22, 1853, February 3, March 3, 1855.
31 Cf. Boston Pilot, February 18, 1854, March 3, 1855; Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 295 ff.
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CONFLICT OF IDEAS
revealed the danger of the issue; Catholic leaders hesitated to antagonize their powerful and influential communicants in Maryland, Louisiana, and throughout the South, dreading a controversy that might divide the Church as it had other re- ligious groups.32 And beyond immediate interests and ideology lay a deep horror of endangering the social fabric, or disturbing the Union as it existed.33
Even more concrete reasons tied the mass of unskilled Irish laborers to the Church in the belief that
when the negroes shall be free To cut the throats of all they see, Then this dear land will come to be The den of foul rascality.34
They feared the competition of the hordes of freed slaves who might invade the North, and valued the security that came from the existence in the country of at least one social class below them.35 Rivalry for the same jobs as Negroes, else- where bondsmen, but in Boston economically and socially more secure than the Irish, strengthened this feeling and led the latter to object to Negro suffrage which aimed at "setting the Niggers high," to complain that colored people did not know their place, and to resent their "impertinence." 36
Irish Catholics also turned against the other humanitarian reforms; for these used the state as an instrument for strength-
32 On this score the Pilot objected to Brownson's hostility to slavery after the opening of the Civil War (cf. Boston Pilot, April 12, 1862). Cf. also ibid., July 8, 1843; Cork Examiner, July 21, 1843; British Consular Correspondence, F.O. 5/426, no. 59.
33 Cf. United States Catholic Intelligencer, October 1, 1831 ; Brownson, Brown- son's Middle Life, II, 280 ff.
34 Boston Pilot, December 31, 1859. 35 Cf. John R. Commons et al., eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (Cleveland, 1910), VII, 60; John Robert Godely, Letters from America (London, 1844), II, 70; William S. Robinson, "Warrington" Pen-Por- traits . . . 1848 to 1876 . .. (Boston, 1877), 298.
36 Cf. Boston Pilot, October 18, 1856. Cf. also, the treatment of the Negro characters, Dolly in Agnes E. St. John's "Ellie Moore" (ibid., June 30-Septem- ber 1, 1860), Phillis in Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey, "Nora Brady's Vow" (ibid., February 21, 1857), and the butler in Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey, "The Heiress of Carrigmona" (ibid., March 3, 1860) .
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
ening secular as against religious forces. On these grounds they fought the current temperance movement, although drunken- ness was particularly prominent among them. Inspired by Father Mathew's efforts, the Church itself had attempted to cope with the problem. But it actively challenged the right of the state to legislate on the matter; and therein enjoyed the support of laborers who jealously guarded their only form of relaxation.37
Even the preponderance of Irish among the city's law- breakers did not weaken the conviction that society was power- less to effect reforms attainable only through grace. Because Catholics felt that criminals were born evil, they objected to treating them "with maternal kindness," "merely as afflicted patients." "A superabundance of humanity in the public sen- timent" and particularly in the Prisoners' Friend Society pam- pered wrongdoers by permitting them to work, to receive occasional visitors and to hear church services on Sunday. These "sickly sentimentalists," "worse . .. than the prisoners they whine over," were doomed to failure because most pris- oners were
deliberate wrongdoers, intentionally at war with society; men who prefer to obtain a precarious livelihood by robbing . .. to the com- forts resulting from the unexciting routine of honest industry. . . . men who have thus become perverted. . . 38
Two current crusades seemed to strike at the roots of family life, and thus at Christian society. To those reared within the grooves of a patriarchal society the "domestic reformers" ap- peared to "have revived pagan orgies in the pitiful farce of 'Women's Rights,' and Bloomerism." 39 But more menacing to public morality were the common schools and the laws for compulsory education :
The general principle upon which these laws are based is radically unsound, untrue, Atheistical. . . . It is, that the education of children
37 Cf. Boston Catholic Observer, April 12, 1848; Boston Pilot, April 24, July 24, 1852, November 9, 1839; Irish-American, November 4, 1854.
Cf. Boston Pilot, March 29, 1851, January 10, 1857.
39 Cf. Cummings, Social Reform, 7; Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel, July 19, 1834.
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CONFLICT OF IDEAS
is not the work of the Church, or of the Family, but that it is the work of the State. ... Two consequences flow from this principle. . . . In the matter of education, the State is supreme over the Church and the family. Hence, the State can and does exclude from the schools religious instruction. . .. The inevitable consequence is, that ... the greater number of scholars must turn out to be Athe- ists, and accordingly the majority of non-Catholics are people of no religion. . . . The other consequence. . . . leads the State to adopt the child, to weaken the ties which bind it to the parent. So laws are made compelling children to attend the state schools, and forbidding the parents, if they be poor, to withdraw their little ones from the school. ... The consequence of this policy is . . . universal dis- obedience on the part of children. . .. Our little boys scoff at their parents, call their fathers by the name of Old Man, Boss, or Governor. The mother is the Old Woman. The little boys smoke, drink, blaspheme, talk about fornication, and so far as they are physically able, commit it. Our little girls read novels . . quarrel about their beaux, uphold Woman's Rights, and - We were a Boston school boy, and we speak of what we know.
When "second rate or tenth rate school masters . . . like Horace Mann . ." were allowed "by the patient people to tinker over the schools until they . . . nearly ruined them," Irish parents hesitated to entrust their children to the common schools, and fought the laws that required them to do so. Persistent and unequivocal hostility to the "kidnapping" sys- tem generated sharp conflicts with other Bostonians who re- garded Massachusetts public education as the keystone of its liberty and culture.40
In the conflict of ideas the Irish found all other foreign groups in the city ranged with the native Bostonians against them. The Germans could be as optimistic, rational and ro- mantic as the natives, for their emigration rested on hope rather than on bare necessity. Unlike the Irish, they went off singing,
40 Cf. Boston Pilot, April 24, October 9, 1852; Boston Catholic Observer, November 15, 1848; United States Catholic Intelligencer, May 18, 1832. For the attitude of other Bostonians, cf. "Report of the Board of Education, 1849," Massachusetts House Documents, 1849, no. 1, pp. 105 ff .; Everett, op. cit., II, 235 ff., 313 ff.
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
Leb' wohl geliebtes Mädchen, Jetzt reis' ich aus den städtchen Muss nun, Feinsliebchen, fort An einem fremden Ort.41
And in America their economic and physical adjustment was relatively simple, so that within a short time they shared the ideas of the natives. Although divisions existed within the German groups, the predominant sentiment held the spirit of free enquiry and intellectual radicalism essential to human progress, measurable in terms of the development of the in- dividual's personality as "a free man." 42 Consequently, they took the same position as the natives on all social questions save temperance, and were far more extreme on the specific issue of slavery.43 Being few in number, the French did not always assume a position as a group. When they did, they were moderately liberal in politics and on the question of slavery, as were the English, Negroes, Italians, and smaller groups.44
About one point only - the revolutions of 1848 - was ad- justment in the conflicting position of the Irish and other Bos- tonians at all possible. Coming when the immigrants had scarcely settled in their new homes, while the instruments of social control were still weak from the effects of transition, the exciting news from the Fatherland sent a tremendous wave of emotion among the Irish. Mobilized in the Repeal Move-
41 Meyer's Monatshefte, February, 1855, V, 128.
42 Cf. Karl Heinzen, Teutscher Radikalismus in Amerika . . . [s.l., 1867], 5-27, 237-260; Atlantis, August, 1857, VII, 81 ff .; A. Siemering, “Die Prinzipien . der modernen Erziehung," Der Pionier, January 26-February 2, 1860; ibid., January 5, 1860.
43 Cf., e.g., Address of the "German Republican Association" of Boston (Euro- pean [New York], December 6, 1856; Der Pionier, March 30, 1856). A short- lived Democratic paper took a compromising attitude based on the constitu- tionality of slavery (Der Neu England Demokrat, November 21, 1857), but quickly failed. Germans opposed the temperance movement not because they objected to reform, but because they felt drinking was a legitimate pleasure needing no reform (cf. Meyer's Monatshefte, February, 1855, V, 128, 147).
44 Cf. Courrier des États-Unis, September 2, 1835, December 5, 1850, Septem- ber 23, 1847; Gazette Française [Boston], June 28, July 5, 1851; Colored Amer- ican [New York], March 4, 1837; L'Eco d'Italia [New York], December 6, April 26, 1851.
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CONFLICT OF IDEAS
ment, Irish national sentiment in America had grown steadily for several years. It had captured the Boston Pilot, originally a clerical paper founded by Bishop Fenwick, and turned it to support the revolutions against the conservative powers of Europe led by Austria.45 Through the Boston Catholic Ob- server, the clergy at first resisted this metamorphosis. But they capitulated in 1848 when the Young Irelanders, impatient with O'Connellite conservatism, raised the banners of rebellion from Cork to Belfast, enlisting the loyalty of the great ma- jority of Irish Americans. Enthusiasm was so great the hier- archy dared not stand in the way. By August Archbishop Hughes of New York gave his approval, proclaiming that the rush to arms had transformed the revolution from "plot" to "fact," and sanctioned a Directory collecting funds in New York. Bishop Fitzpatrick did not weaken to the extent of backing the insurrection, but did not openly oppose it. His organ, the Boston Catholic Observer, edited by Brownson, cautiously reprinted the Archbishop's statement without com- ment.46
The Bishop hesitated because of the uncertainty of Vatican policy. Pius IX had been regarded as a progressive from his accession.47 His early liberal efforts promised so much that the future editor of the Boston Pilot, Father John T. Roddan, a brilliant young American priest educated at the Propaganda, had returned to Boston "almost a Mazzinian . . quite enam- ored of the European revolutionary movements." 48 While the Pope was undecided, Catholic conservatives vacillated on the subject of revolution and permitted the radicals to dominate Irish opinion.49
45 Cf., e.g., Boston Pilot, January 1, 8, July 15, 1848.
46 Cf. Boston Catholic Observer, August 23, 1848.
47 Cf., e.g., Voice of Industry (Boston), November 26, 1847; Boston Merkur, October 2, December 25, 1847, January 1, 1848.
48 Brownson to Montalembert, June 30, 1851 (Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 326, 327). For Father Roddan, cf. Boston Pilot, December II, 1858.
49 Thus Brownson's Boston Catholic Observer was occasionally hostile to re- actionary Austria (cf., e.g., Boston Catholic Observer, December 4, 11, 18, 1847, January 8, 1848).
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
A common stake in revolutionary success drew the Irish closer to other groups. Young Ireland, influenced by con- tinental ideas, was not far different from Young Italy. Though it lacked the broad humanitarianism of the Boston reformers and was openly sympathetic toward slavery, nationalism never- theless provided a point of contact with other Bostonians.50 Collaboration with abolitionists like Quincy and Phillips was a potential wedge that might have split the Irish from their conservatism and opened their minds to the liberal position. Even the collapse of the insurrection did not discredit it, for many of its leaders eventually found their way to the United States. They were still popular; their opinions still carried weight; and for a time they exerted a positive liber- alizing influence over their countrymen through lectures and through their newspapers, the Irish-American and the Citi- zen.51
The rapprochement did not last long, however; it finally gave way before the revived and unified opposition of the clergy. The insurgency of the Roman republic alienated the papacy from the cause of revolution; and the victory of Radetsky's Austrian legions facilitated the adoption of a clear- cut, conservative policy. As a result, Archbishop Hughes and the Freeman's Journal disowned Young Ireland, and Catholic policy in Boston as elsewhere resolutely opposed the policies of red republicanism which, in retrospect, it linked with an atheistic plot of Protestants to undermine Catholic civilization. These, it charged:
saw the Church gathering America to her bosom . .. they saw themselves losing ground everywhere, and, as they gnashed their teeth with rage and pined away, the ministers in white choackers formed in England and in America an Alliance, and resolved to carry the war into Italy, - to revolutionize that country. It would be a great tri- umph to them, and to their father, the devil, if they could match
50 For the attitude of Irish-American radicals towards slavery, cf. European [New York], December 6, 1856; Irish-American, January 18, 1851.
51 Cf. Alfred Bunn, Old England and New England . .. (London, 1853), II, 12, 13.
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CONFLICT OF IDEAS
Catholic progress in Protestant countries with Protestant progress in Catholic countries. ... They fermented the revolutions of 1848
by forming
a grand conspiracy, with its central government . . . in London, and its ramifications extending even to this country. ... armed not merely against monarchy, but against all legitimate authority, against all religion except an idolatrous worship of ... the GOD-PEOPLE .. against all morality, . . . law, . . . order, and ... society itself.52
The Church conducted a persistent campaign against the "spirit of radical Protestantism" which had "crept into every class of society, into every . .. political order" and which "nought can destroy but the true Catholic spirit." 53 Time after time it inveighed against the "political atheism" growing out of the belief that "the State, if not the sovereign, is at least not the subject of Religion," a belief that gave rise to "the revolutions, crimes, civil wars which have recently been and are coming again. . ."> 54 Led by Brownson, the Catholic press attacked the uprisings in Europe and their supporters in Boston, urging upon a restless people "the necessity of sub- ordination and obedience to lawful rulers." 55 "Good Catho- lics," they argued, "must accept ... the constitution of the State, when once established, whatever its form, yet . . . have no right to conspire to change the constitution, or to effect a revolution in the State. Consequently ... our sympathies can never be with those who conspire against the law, or with the mad revolutionists and radicals, on the Continent of Eu- rope, who are unsettling every thing." 56
52 Cf. Boston Pilot, January 22, 1853; Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 418 ff .; Boston Catholic Observer, September 20, October 11, November 1, 1848. 53 Boston Catholic Observer, February 16, 1848; cf. also O. A. Brownson, "Liberalism and Catholicity," Works of Brownson, V, 476 ff.
54 Boston Catholic Observer, March 29, 1848.
55 Boston Catholic Observer, August 2, 1848. Cf. also the attacks on the Pilot by the New York Freeman's Journal and the Propagateur Catholique (quoted Boston Pilot, August 18, 1849).
56 Boston Catholic Observer, December 6, 1848; Brownson, Brownson's Mid- dle Life, 358.
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
In the face of this overwhelming propaganda, the influence of the Young Irelanders waned steadily. The success of the revolution might have furnished a concrete rallying point for progressive influences against the conservative tendencies in Irish life. As it was, the movement dissolved in endless talk. The conservatives easily recaptured the Boston Pilot when its owner, Patrick Donahoe, ignominiously capitulated to the Bishop and allowed his paper to be edited by an American priest, John T. Roddan, by now a disciple of Brownson.57 Continual quarrels divided the ranks of the radicals and deser- tion further depleted them. T. D. McGee withdrew first to the clerical party and then to the hated English from whom he accepted a cabinet post in Canada. Mitchel, disgusted, retired to the rusticity of Tennessee, and Maegher to a law practice in New York and the career of a Democratic politician.58 Al- though Fenianism revived Irish nationalism in 1859, it had none of the liberal ideas of 1848. By then the opposition to conserva- tism had disappeared, lingering only in the minds of a few die-hards.
Flirtation with revolution was a passing interlude with no effect upon the normal Irish respect for authority. Always, conservatism segregated them from other Bostonians, who be- lieved that all revolutions signified the dawn of a new era that would spread the light of American liberty over a renaissant Europe. Natives, and for that matter, non-Irish foreigners, had taken an active interest in the Polish struggle for liberty, and had hailed the French revolution of 1830 with delight, though Catholics dubbed it the work of "an irreligious and profligate minority." Americans approved of the uprisings of 1848 set off by the abdication of "that great swindle," Louis Philippe, as unanimously as the Irish eventually disapproved. Henry Adams was an ardent admirer of Garibaldi, and Mar- garet Fuller, among many, adored Mazzini whom the Irish
57 Cf. Boston Pilot, September 14, 28, June 22, 1850.
58 Cf. Frederick Driscoll, Sketch of the Canadian Ministry (Montreal, 1866), 81; E. M. Coulter, William Brownlow ... (Chapel Hill, 1937), 48, 49, 65.
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hated. Almost all Bostonians liked the Hungarians and wel- comed Kossuth, but Catholics branded him a disappointed manufacturer of humbugs. The Irish attacked the Swiss for sheltering rebels, and condemned the Fenian Brotherhoods in America; while in the Crimean War, which they called a strug- gle of "Civilized Society against red republican barbarism," they supported Russia against Protestant England and against Turkey, which had protected Kossuth.59
Fighting radicalism everywhere, they consistently maintained the principles of conservatism by defending the Catholic pow- ers of Europe - Spain, Austria, and Italy - the nations con- sidered most backward, ignorant, and intolerant by Boston public opinion.60 Every unfavorable comment on these coun- tries by an American provoked a bitter defense in the Irish press.61 In the Mediai matter, they upheld religious intoler- ance in Italy, and left themselves open to charges of having "a different set of principles to suit the market of every coun- try." 62 In the Black Warrior affair they championed Spain and in the Koszta case, Austria against the United States.63
59 For the native attitude, cf. George Sumner, Oration ... before the munici- pal Authorities of . .. Boston, July 4, 1859 . . . (Boston, 1882), 24-34; Daily Evening Transcript, June 10, 13, 1831; Samuel Adams Drake, Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (Boston, 1873), 264; Massachusetts House Documents, 1848, no. 147; Elizabeth Brett White, American Opinion of France, from Lafayette to Poincaré (New York, 1927), 119-122; Voice of Industry, March 31, 1848; New Era of Industry, June 2, 1848; Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller, Whetstone of Genius (New York, 1940), 185, 243; Giovanni Mori, "Una Mazziniana d'America .
, Rivista d'Italia e d'America, September, 1924, II, 478 ff .; George S. Boutwell, "Kossuth in New England," New England Magazine, July, 1894, X, 525 ff. For the Irish attitude, cf. Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel, November 13, October 30, 1830; United States Catholic Intelligencer, October 8, 1831; Boston Pilot, June 15, 22, August 31, 1850, April 24, 1852 ; Brownson, Brownson's Middle Life, 418 ff .; Schlesinger, op. cit., 207; Boston Pilot, February 8, 1851; Boston Catholic Observer, February 23, 1848; Acta Sanctae Sedis (Romae, 1865), I, 290 ff .; Dissertation Copy, 259.
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