USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 17
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95 Cf. Western Star and Harp of Erin (New York), May 16, 1812-May I, 1813; Louis Dow Scisco, Political Nativism in New York State (Columbia Uni- versity Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, XIII, New York, 1901), 19.
Lord, loc. cit., 177. Another children's newspaper, Young Catholics Friend, edited by H. B. C. Greene, appeared for a short time in March, 1840.
97 Literary and Catholic Sentinel, January 3, December 19, 1835, January 2, 1836. To avoid confusion with a later paper of the same name, it is referred to throughout this work by its original title.
98 Ibid., June II, October 22, November 12, 19, 1836; McGee, History of the Irish Settlers, 132.
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it was still in serious difficulties. But the immigration of the forties brought security.99
Prosperity completely reoriented the Pilot's policy. In 1842, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, a green Irishman of seventeen, elec- trified a Boston audience with a patriotic oration that won him an editorial position on the Pilot, and made him editor-in-chief in 1844. Set by him on a radical course, the Pilot preached Irish nationalism, even after he returned to Dublin to edit the Nation. Once drawn into the Repeal Movement, the paper became dependent less upon the support of the Church than upon that of popular opinion. And with the aid of that support it could outlive occasional rivals such as the New England Reporter and Catholic Diary.100
Repeal under the respectable auspices of O'Connell was safe, but after 1845, the Pilot espoused the program of Young Ireland and became intolerable to the Church. To counteract the Pilot's influence, the Bishop, through Brownson, sponsored the Boston Catholic Observer, a religious rival. At the same time a political newspaper, the Boston Vindicator, appeared and was hailed as an ally by the Observer.101 Neither the Vin- dicator nor J. R. Fitzgerald's Nation which replaced it, lasted long; but for two years the Observer and Pilot bitterly fought out the issues of Irish conservatism and radicalism.102 In 1848, however, the Pilot acquired still another competitor. In that year, McGee returned from Ireland, established the New York Nation, and by the glamor of actual participation in the revolution drew many readers away from the Pilot. Weakened
89 Boston Pilot, December 22, 29, 1838, November 16, 1839.
100 Cf. Mrs. J. Sadlier, Biographical Sketch, 17, 18; Robert D. McGibbon, Thomas D'Arcy McGee ... (Montreal, 1884), 7; Skelton, op. cit., II ff .; Bos- ton Pilot, July 23, 1842, October II, 1845.
101 Cf. Shea, op. cit., IV, 154; Boston Catholic Observer, January 23, 1847, June 21, 1848. The break was not open at first, the Observer being printed by P. Donahoe, owner of the Pilot (ibid., January 16, 1847).
102 The Pilot was at a tremendous disadvantage, since it could not openly attack the priest who edited the Observer. Its criticisms were guarded and apologetic. But its rival had no scruples, attacking it as "avowedly anti- Catholic," "guilty of uttering heresy" (cf. Boston Catholic Observer, June 7, 14, May 24, and especially June 28, 1848).
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further by continued opposition from the clergy, the Pilot re- canted in 1849 and turned conservative. The cross and dove replaced the red cap of liberty in its masthead, and Father John T. Roddan, an American priest, became its editor. Al- though many felt that "Donahoe will have a jolly grill in Purgatory for the evil he has done," his paper remained reli- giously dependable thereafter.103
Meanwhile, McGee's radicalism had antagonized Archbishop Hughes of New York, who forced the Nation out of business by a vigorous destructive campaign in 1850. Left without a journal, the Massachusetts radicals invited the still unre- pentant rebel to come to Boston where he established the American Celt in 1850. But McGee failed to prosper. The Pilot and the clergy attacked him and he faced the serious competition of Phelim Lynch's Irish-American, which had taken his place in New York by 1849. After two years he finally shed his radicalism and made peace with the Church. But since there was no room in Boston for two conservative papers, he left for Buffalo and eventually for Montreal.104
No longer strong enough to support a newspaper, the radicals thereafter confined their reading to the New York Irish- American. As the former revolutionaries splintered into cliques, each established an organ: John Mitchel's Citizen, Doheny's Honest Truth, and Maegher's Irish News. But neither these nor occasional fugitive papers like William Jackson's Irish Pictorial Miscellany or Patrick X. Keating's Illustrated Irish Nation menaced the secure hold of the Pilot upon the Irish reading public.105
Only the Negroes developed a group consciousness com- parable to that of the Irish. Although accepted as equals in
103 Cf. Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson's Middle Life ... (Detroit, 1899), 441 ; Skelton, op. cit., 162 ff .; Boston Pilot, January 1, 1848, January 4, 185I.
104 Cf. Sadlier, loc. cit., 22, 23, 27-30; Skelton, op. cit., 163 ff., 183 ff., 194 ff., 199, 281 ff .; Irish-American, August 12, 1849, May 30, 1857.
105 Cf. Citizen (New York), January 7, 1854; Boston Pilot, March 24, 1855, April 24, March 27, 1858, April 2, 1859; European, December 6, 1856.
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DEVELOPMENT OF GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS
some sects,106 sharp color prejudice compelled colored Method- ists and Baptists to organize their own churches in the West End.107 Discrimination kept them out of the common schools and made necessary the organization of a distinct system with the aid of the town and of the Abiel Smith legacy.108 The refusal of the white Masons to admit Negroes caused the for- mation of autonomous lodges affiliated not with other Massa- chusetts lodges, but with the Grand Lodge of England.109 Similar motives provoked the attempt to organize a Negro military company, while the struggle for equality for them- selves and for freedom for their enslaved kinsmen fostered Russworm's Freedom's Journal and the New York Colored American, and the organization of vigilantes that helped save Shadrach and attempted to rescue Burns.110 But Negro aware- ness of race derived not from differences they desired to cherish, but rather from a single difference - color - which they de- sired to discard. Thus, as soon as a change in law in 1855 admitted Negroes to the common schools, their own closed.111 Their consciousness was a factor of the prejudice of others, 106 Cf., e.g., Memoir of Mrs. Chloe Spear, a Native of Africa .. . by a Lady of Boston (Boston, 1832), 41, 49, 71 ff.
107 John Hayward, Gazetteer of Massachusetts ... (Boston, 1849), 88, 90, 97; Massachusetts House Documents, 1840, no. 60, p. 22; Winsor, op. cit., III, 424, 425, 441; Bowen's Picture of Boston . . . (Boston, 1829), 149, 151, 152 ; Boston Directory, 1830, 31; W. H. Siebert, Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1898), facing 235.
108 Cf. Dissertation Copy, 333 ff .; George W. Crawford, Prince Hall and His Followers . (New York, n.d. [1914]), 13 ff .; Minutes of the Selectmen's Meetings . 1818 . . . 1822 (Volume of Records Relating to the Early History of Boston, XXXIX), Boston City Documents, 1909, no. 61, p. 192; African Repository and Colonial Journal, May, 1830, VI, 89; ibid., November, 1827, III, 271; Helen T. Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro ... (Washington, 1936), IV, 512 ff.
109 Lewis Hayden, Grand Lodge Jurisdictional Claim ... (Boston, 1868), 30 ff., 84; Charles H. Wesley, Richard Allen ... (Washington, n.d. [1935]), 93; Boston Almanac, 1866, 166, 167. 110 Cf. Boston Pilot, September 8, 1855, June 12, 1852, October 5, 1850, Feb- ruary 22, 1851; Catterall, op. cit., IV, 502 ff .; Colored American (New York), January 7, 1837 ff .; Vernon Loggins, Negro Author ... (New York, 1931), 53 ff .; William S. Robinson, "Warrington" Pen-Portraits . . . 1848 to 1876 . . . (Boston, 1877), 71 ff., 191; Siebert, Underground Railroad, 72, 251.
111 "Report of the State Board of Education," Massachusetts Public Docu- ments, 1860, no. 2, p. 134; Boston Pilot, September 15, 1855.
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
and declined as that subsided. They lacked the cohesiveness and coherence generated in the Irish by their economic, phys- ical, and intellectual development in Boston.
The flourishing growth of Irish institutions was an accurate reflection of their consciousness of group identity. These au- tonomous activities had no counterpart in the Old World where the community was a unified whole, adequately satisfying all the social desires of its members. Independent societies de- veloped among immigrants only in Boston in response to the inadequacy of the city as it was to fill their needs. Since the non-Irish foreigners felt differences only at occasional partic- ular points, they diverged from native social organizations infrequently, in localized activities of diminishing vitality. But the development of the Irish had broadened original differences so widely that the Pilot concluded, "co-operation for any length of time in important matters between true Catholics and real Protestants is morally impossible." 112 Unable to participate in the normal associational affairs of the community, the Irish felt obliged to erect a society within a society, to act together in their own way. In every contact therefore the group, acting apart from other sections of the community, became intensely aware of its peculiar and exclusive identity.
The degree of intermarriage at once reflected and buttressed the distinction between the Irish and all others. Among the Irish, religious and social considerations reënforced the natural tendency to mate with their own kind. As Catholics, they were repeatedly warned that union with Protestants was tantamount to loss of faith; while the great majority of non-Irish in the city considered marriage with them degrading.113 As a result, the percentage of Irish intermarriage was lower than that of any other group including the Negroes, 12 per cent of whose marriages were with whites.114
112 Boston Pilot, July 29, 1854.
113 Cf., e.g., Courrier des Etats-Unis, May 15, 1851 ; Edward Dicey, Six Months in the Federal States (London, 1863), II, 179.
114 "Annual Report by the City Registrar . .. 1865," Boston City Documents, 1866, no. 88, p. 15; Der Pionier, January 26, 1860. Table XXVII gives figures
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DEVELOPMENT OF GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS
Group consciousness in the newcomers provoked a secondary reaction in native Bostonians, almost nonexistent in the eight- eenth and early nineteenth centuries, when French Huguenots, Jews, Scots, Scotch-Irish and Irishmen had had no difficulty in assimilating with the older stock.115 Americans now became more conscious of their own identity. They began to distin- guish themselves, the Anglo-Saxons, from the Irish "Kelts." 116 The old society felt a sense of malaise because newcomers did not fit into its categories, and resentment, because they threat- ened its stability. Uneasy, it attempted to avoid contact by withdrawing ever farther into a solid, coherent, and circum- scribed group of its own, until in the fifties it evolved the true Brahmin who believed, with Holmes, that a man of family re- quired "four or five generations of gentlemen and gentle- women" behind him.117
of intermarriage in 1863-65 when the degree of assimilation should have been at its height. Only German women married more closely into their own group than the Irish, and that because they were so far outnumbered by German men. However, German male intermarriages more than counterbalanced this. 115 Cf., e.g., Winsor, op. cit., II, 553 ff .; Wittke, op. cit., 24 ff .; Cullen, op. cit., 194, 195.
116 Cf., e.g., "The Anglo-Saxon Race," North American Review, July, 1851, LXXIII, 53, 34 ff .; and Emerson's use of the term in "English Traits," Collected Works (Boston, 1903), V.
117 Cf. M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Holmes of the Breakfast Table (New York, 1939), 7, 12.
CHAPTER VII
GROUP CONFLICT
We still drive out of Society the Ishmaels and Esaus. This we do not so much from ill-will as want of thought, but thereby we lose the strength of these outcasts. So much water runs over the dam - wasted and wasting! 1
CONSCIOUSNESS of identity particularized groups; but mere pluralism evoked no conflict in Boston society. Those co- herently welded by circumstances of origin, economic status, cultural variations, or color differences often moved in distinct orbits, but were part of a harmonious system. In some in- stances, native Bostonians adopted newcomers; in others, they adapted themselves to the existence of aliens in their com- munity. But whatever friction arose out of the necessity for making adjustments produced no conflict, until the old social order and the values upon which it rested were endangered.
Thus, while prejudice against color and servile economic origin confined the Negroes to restricted residential areas, dis- tinct churches, special jobs, separate schools, and undesirable places in theatres until the 1850's, the relationships between Negroes and other Bostonians were stable and peaceful.2 Social and legal discriminations still limited Negro privileges in the Park Street Church in 1830, and incited protests when Alcott included a Negro child in his infant school.3 But the stigmata and penalties for being different were slowly vanishing. Those
1 Theodore Parker, A Sermon of the Dangerous Classes in Society . . . (Bos- ton, 1847), 12.
2 Cf., e.g., the sober editorial on Negro problems in Daily Evening Tran- script, September 28, 1830; cf. also Mary Caroline Crawford, Romantic Days in Old Boston . . . (Boston, 1910), 249; Helen T. Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro . . . (Washington, 1936), IV, 524. 3 Cf. E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States . . . (London, 1835), I, 133 ff .; Odell Shepard, Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston, 1938), 110.
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GROUP CONFLICT
who urged equality for the South were perforce obliged to apply their convictions at home. An attempt in 1822 to re- strict the immigration of Negro paupers failed and repeated petitions after 1839 finally secured the repeal of laws against intermarriage, thus legalizing a process already in existence.4 In 1855 separate schools were abolished and colored children unconditionally admitted to the public schools, so that by 1866 some 150 Negroes attended the primary, 103 the grammar, and five the high schools of Boston - in all, a high percentage of the Negro children of the city.5 The state actively defended and protected Negroes' rights, even establishing missions for that purpose in Charleston and New Orleans where Boston colored seamen were often seized as fugitive slaves.6 Public pressure forced the Eastern and New Bedford Railroads to admit colored people to their cars in the forties; and former slaves began to move to the same streets as whites.7 In 1863, they were permitted to fight in the Union Army when Gov- ernor Andrew, with the aid of Lewis Hayden, recruited the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, which included 300 fugi- tive slaves. In the same year, the militia was opened to them, and a colored company in Ward Six received a grant from the city. Negro regiments were segregated, but many prom- inent Bostonians "taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with" them.8 By 1865, the Negroes, though still a
4 Cf. [Theodore Lyman, Jr.], Free Negroes and Mulattoes, House of Repre- sentatives, January 16, 1822 . . . Report ... (Boston, n.d.) ; Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (Boston, 1872), I, 489-492.
5 316 between the ages of 10 and 15 ("Report of the School Committee, 1866," Boston City Documents, 1866, no. 137, p. 188). Cf. also Boston Pilot, Sep- tember 15, October 6, 1855.
6 Cf. the letters of Edward Everett to John P. Bigelow, dated July 23, 1839, September 30, 1839 (Bigelow Papers [MSS., H. C.L.], Box V, VI) ; Arthur B. Darling, Poiltical Changes in Massachusetts ... (New Haven, 1925), 320; Catterall, op. cit., IV, 511, 524; Edward Channing, History of the United States (New York, 1925), VI, 93 ff.
7 Cf. Wilson, op. cit., I, 492-495; Lady Emmeline S. Wortley, Travels in the United States . .. (New York, 1851), 60; Edward Dicey, Six Months in the Federal States (London, 1863), II, 215.
Exercises at the Dedication of the Monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw . .. May 31, 1897 ... (Boston, 1897), 10; Henry Greenleaf Pearson,
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
separate part of Boston society, participated in its advantages without conflict. And most Bostonians agreed that "the theory of a natural antagonism and insuperable prejudice on the part of the white man against the black is a pure fiction. Ignorant men are always full of prejudices and antagonisms; and color has nothing to do with it." 9
Group consciousness based upon religious differences was likewise not conducive to conflict. The Puritan dislike of Catholics had subsided during the eighteenth century,10 and had disappeared in the early nineteenth as a result of the good feelings produced by revolutionary collaboration with the French and the growth of the latitudinarian belief that "inside of Christianity reason was free." 11 Governor Hancock had
Life of John A. Andrew ... (Boston, 1904), II, 70 ff .; William S. Robinson, "Warrington" Pen-Portraits ... (Boston, 1877), 107, 274, 406; A. B. Hart, Commonwealth History of Massachusetts ... (New York, 1930), IV, 535; Boston City Documents, 1863, no. 100, pp. 11, 18.
9 Robinson, op. cit., 298; cf. also Dicey, op. cit., I, 70, 74; Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1841, no. 51; Massachusetts House Documents, 1841, no. 17. 10 Thus with few exceptions there was a "general absence of anti-Catholic references" in eighteenth century textbooks, and the Dudleian lectures were founded to counteract "the rapid rise of liberalism" (Rev. Arthur J. Riley, Catholicism in New England ... [Catholic University ... Studies in Amer- ican Church History, XXIV, Washington, 1936], 307, 23, 31, 225). The only exception was the hostility, primarily political, to Jesuit activities in Maine (ibid., 6, 193 ff .; Channing, op. cit., II, 131 ff., 531, 545 ff.). For Puritan intoler- ance, cf. Ray Allen Billington, Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860, A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York, 1938), 7, 15, 18; Riley, op. cit., 45 ff., 217 ff. This intolerance sprang from the desire to found a "bible common- wealth" and was therefore directed against Baptists, Quakers and Arminians as well (cf. Channing, op. cit., II, 68). When priests visited Boston under cir- cumstances that did not endanger the "Standing Order" they "received a cordial welcome befitting the social amenities exchanged between educated persons" (Riley, op. cit., 190, 184 ff., 206, 207).
11 Octavius B. Frothingham, Boston Unitarianism, 1820-1850 . . . (New York, 1890), 23; Archibald H. Grimke, Life of Charles Sumner . (New York, 1892), 38. For the popularity of the French in Boston, cf. H. M. Jones, America and French Culture . . . (Chapel Hill, 1927), 126; for the effect of the revolution, cf. John G. Shea, "Catholic Church in American History," Amer- ican Catholic Quarterly Review, January, 1876, I, 155; Billington, op. cit., 19.
Those who regard anti-Catholicism as inherent in the nature of Protestant society, and define "the Protestant milieu" as "nothing else than opposition to Catholicism" (Riley, op. cit., vii, I; "Anti-Catholic Movements in the United States," Catholic World, March, 1876, XXII, 810; Billington, op. cit., I) have been hard put to explain the tolerance of the early nineteenth century. The simplest escape has been to mark it a period of subsidence arising from ab-
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GROUP CONFLICT
early abolished Pope's Day, and the Constitution of 1780 had eliminated the legal restrictions against Catholics. Catholics established a church in the city in 1789 "without the smallest opposition, for persecution in Boston had wholly ceased," and "all violent prejudices against the good bishop of Rome and the Church ... he governs" had vanished, along with hos- tility towards hierarchical institutions in general.12 Bishop Carroll, visiting Boston in 1791, preached before the Governor, pronounced the blessing at the annual election of the Ancient and Honorables, and was amazed at the good treatment ac- corded him. Bishop Cheverus commanded the respect and affection of all Protestants. The City Council frequently gave Catholics special privileges to insure freedom of worship, clos- ing the streets near Holy Cross Church to exclude the noise of passing trucks.13 It never took advantage of the laws to tax for the support of churches; on the contrary, Boston Prot- estants often contributed to Catholic churches and institutions. After 1799 no tithes were collected, by 1820 religious tests were abolished, and in 1833 Church and State completely sep- arated.14 The anti-Catholic activities of the New York Prot-
sorption in other problems (cf. Billington, op. cit., 32; Humphrey J. Desmond, Know-Nothing Party [Washington, 1904], 12), with the anti-Catholicism of the forties and fifties simply a recrudescence of forces always present, thus missing completely the significance of the special factors that produced it in those two decades.
12 Samuel Breck, "Catholic Recollections," American Catholic Historical Re- searches, October, 1895, XII, 146, 148; E. Percival Merritt, "Sketches of the Three Earliest Roman Catholic Priests in Boston," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXV, 218 ff .; William Wilson Manross, Episcopal Church in the United States, 1800-1840, A Study in Church Life (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, no. 441, New York, 1938), 59; Samuel Eliot Morison, History of the Constitution of Massachusetts . (Boston, 1917), 24.
13 Cf. Merritt, loc. cit., 205-207; Billington, op. cit., 20; Josiah Quincy, Figures of the Past from the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston, 1883), 311, 312 ; Minutes of the Selectmen's Meetings, 1811 to 1817 . . . (Volume of Records Relating to the Early History of Boston, XXXVIII), Boston City Documents, 1908, no. 60, p. 69; James Bernard Cullen, Story of the Irish in Boston .. . (Boston, 1890), 125; Leo F. Ruskowski, French Emigré Priests in the United States ... (Washington, 1940), 85.
14 Cf. Morison, op. cit., 24, 32; Boston Catholic Observer, April 17, 1847; Rev. James Fitton, Sketches of the Establishment of the Church in New Eng- land (Boston, 1872), 141; Darling, op. cit., 23; Hart, op. cit., IV, 12.
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BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
estant and of the New York Protestant Association in the early thirties had no counterpart in Boston where an attempt to found an anti-Catholic paper (Anti-Jesuit) in 1829 failed.15 Accepted as loyal members of the community, Catholics could easily partake of its opportunities.16 Their right to be different was consistently defended by natives who urged that the par- ticular sect each person chose was a private matter. "In individual instances where our friends and acquaintances join the Romish Church, there may be reason either to be glad of it or to grieve. If they join the Church . .. because they need its peculiar influence for their own good, if never having found peace in Christ elsewhere they do find it there, ought we not to rejoice in such a result? Why should we doubt that some minds are better fitted to find a personal union with God by the methods of the Catholic Church than by any other?" 17
There were of course differences between the sects, expressed in theological disputations. As early as 1791 Thayer offered to debate any Protestant in a "controversial lecture." 18 Beecher and Bishop Fenwick, assisted by Father O'Flaherty, engaged in a series of debates in 1830-34, the most prominent of the period. And the religious press and sermons occasionally at- tacked Catholicism, sometimes violently, in the spirit of all contemporary disputes, while Protestant denominations urged their ministers to resist the spread of "Popery." 19
But the expression of theological differences did not imply
15 Cf. Billington, op. cit., 53 ff., 76. The Boston Irish Protestant Association which Billington claimed was anti-Catholic (ibid., 78, n. 48) specifically dis- avowed such activities (cf. the correspondence in Boston Pilot, June 25, July 2, 1842; also Boston Catholic Observer, August 2, 1848). 16 Cf., e.g., Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel, July 23, 1831; Marcus Lee Hansen, Immigrant in American History ... (Cambridge, 1940), 107.
17 James Freeman Clarke, The Church . . . as It Was, as It Is, as It Ought to Be, a Discourse at the . . . Chapel ... Church of the Disciples . . . 1848 (Boston, 1848), 13; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Orestes A. Brownson (Bos- ton, 1939), 175.
18 Cf. Columbian Centinel (Boston), January 26, 1791; ibid., February 2, 1791; American Catholic Historical Researches, January, 1888, V, 51.
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