USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 23
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III. OTHER CONTEMPORARY MATERIAL
The well-known ACCOUNTS OF VISITORS to Boston were of value in dealing with the background of the city, but threw little light on the condition of the immigrants. Few travellers ventured off the beaten track that led inevitably from the State House to Bunker Hill and Mount Auburn. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt's Voyage dans les États-Unis d'Amérique . . . (Paris, An VII) gives an early descrip- tion of the town; "Boston as It Appeared to a Foreigner at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century . . . " (Bostonian Society Pub-
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lications, Series I, IV) pictures it ten years before and W. Faux's Memorable Days in America . . . (London, 1823) ten years after the War of 1812. Harriet Martineau's Society in America (New York, 1837) has overshadowed other accounts of the 1830's quite unjustly, for that decade also saw the publication of A Journal of a Residence ... in the United States of North America ... (London, 1835) by the English abolitionist, Edward S. Abdy, of George Combe's Notes on the United States of North America during a Phre- nological Visit in 1838-40 (Philadelphia, 1841), and of a significant criminological study by Nikolaus Heinrich Julius, Nordamerikas sittliche Zustände nach eigenen Anschauungen in den Jahren 1834, 1835, und 1836 (Leipzig, 1839). Boston welcomed Sir Charles Lyell, the geologist, ten years later and in return was sympathetically de- scribed in A Second Visit to the United States of North America (London, 1849). L'Aristocratie en Amérique (Paris, 1883) by Fred- eric Gaillardet, editor of the Courrier des États-Unis in this period, is disappointingly superficial; but Thomas C. Grattan's Civilized America (London, 1859) embodies the results of his intelligent ob- servations as consul in Boston, and Edward Dicey's Six Months in the Federal States (London, 1863) is adequate for the Civil War years.
IMMIGRANT GUIDES fall into a special category. Their most elo- quent evidence was negative in so far as they failed to mention Bos- ton at all. America and Her Resources . .. (London, 1818) by John Bristed, and Martin Doyle's Hints on Emigration . . . (Dublin, 1831) were typical of the English and L. von Baumbach's Neue Briefe aus den Vereinigten Staaten . . . (Cassel, 1856), of the Ger- man. The German in America, or Advice and Instruction for German Emigrants in the United States . . . (Boston, 1851) was worth not- ing because it was written by Frederick W. Bogen, pastor of the Lutheran church in Boston. The discussion of industrial develop- ments and opportunities in Erwerbszweige, Fabrikwesen und Handel von Nordamerika . . . (Stuttgart, 1850) by C. L. Fleischmann, an American consul in Germany, is informative, and Franz Löher's Geschichte und Zustände der Deutschen in Amerika . . . (Cincin- nati, 1847) contains one of the few good accounts of the German community in Boston.
PAMPHLETS proved useful in many phases of this study. They were one of the most important sources of information on the back- ground of emigration from Ireland. This fugitive literature came from the presses of Dublin and the provincial towns with bewildering frequency; everyone who had an opinion expressed it through this medium. The poor-law issue provoked a particularly valuable suc-
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cession of controversial publications and the famines of 1814 and 1823 were described in considerable detail by investigating commit- tees. Few of these pamphlets were outstanding; rather their value lay in the cumulative weight of their evidence. Several thousand are admirably arranged in the Haliday Collection of the Royal Irish Academy, catalogued by J. T. Gilbert (MS., R.I.A.).
Similar material for Boston is also plentiful. The Harvard College Library has a complete file of Directories from 1789 and of Almanacs and Registers from 1830. There is no lack of guide books and an abundance of pamphlets on all the important issues of the day. In addition low printing costs and prolific preachers combined to pro- duce an outpouring of sermons that dealt with all phases of the city's intellectual life, and sometimes, as in Parker's case, with many broader aspects of its social and economic structure.
IV. IMMIGRATION AND ITS BACKGROUND
There is no satisfactory GENERAL ACCOUNT of American immigra- tion. The Immigrant in American History ... (Cambridge, 1940) contains a series of provocative essays by Marcus Lee Hansen which display insight as well as scholarship. Carl Wittke's We Who Built America ... (New York, 1939) summarizes the results of recent investigations but is marred by a lack of proportion in emphasis. Probably the best general approach to the problem is through the documents collected in Edith Abbott's Immigration Select Docu- ments ... (Chicago, 1924) and Historical Aspects of the Immigra- tion Problem . .. (Chicago, 1926), although, in both, the legal aspects are given too much weight.
There are a number of worthwhile studies of the causes of emigra- tion both in individual countries and for EUROPE AS A WHOLE. The broader trends in population may be traced in A. M. Carr-Saunders, Population Problem . . . (Oxford, 1922) and World Population . . . (Oxford, 1936). Maurice R. Davie's World Immigration . . . (New York, 1936) contains a more comprehensive general account than René Gonnard's L'Émigration européenne au XIX siècle . .. (Paris, 1906). Far more detailed than either, but in some ways less useful, is International Migrations (New York, 1929, 1932) edited by Imre Ferenczi and Walter F. Willcox; lack of consistency among the contributors, and the failure to integrate the discussion with the statistics detract seriously from its value. All of these have been superseded, within the field it covers, by Marcus Lee Hansen's Atlan- tic Migration, 1607-1860 . . . (Cambridge, 1940), a careful study of all phases of the movement, particularly valuable for its light on emigration from central Europe. In comparison Edwin C. Guillet's
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Great Migration ... (New York, 1937), which deals primarily with Great Britain, is superficial and traditional.
The literature for the background of BRITISH emigration is ample. Élie Halévy's History of the English People in 1815 (Harmondsworth, 1937) gives a sympathetic account of the social structure of the island while J. H. Clapham describes its economic institutions in Economic History of Modern Britain ... (Cambridge, 1932). In- dustrial and agricultural changes may be followed in the works of J. L. and Barbara Hammond while the Population Problems of the Age of Malthus (Cambridge, 1926) are dealt with in a competent but uninspired fashion by G. Talbot Griffith. Sidney and Beatrice Webb have adequately discussed the problems of poor relief in English Poor Law Policy (London, 1910) and English Poor Law History ... (London, 1927-29). Clapham's study of "Irish Immi- gration into Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century" (Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, V) draws atten- tion to an important subject, but the problem of population move- ments as a whole has received no full treatment. Stanley C. Johnson's History of Emigration from the United Kingdom . . . (London, 1913) is unimaginative and almost wholly statistical as is William A. Carrothers' Emigration from the British Isles with Special Reference to the . . . Overseas Dominions (London, 1929).
Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World from 1815 to the Famine ... (New Haven, 1932) have been dealt with in detail by William Forbes Adams in a scholarly study which, however, passes lightly over the poor law issue, and, in addition, is unsympathetic to the peasantry. George O'Brien's Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1918) and his Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine (London, 1921) are admirable and essential; but Constantia Maxwell's Country and Town in Ireland under the Georges (London, 1940) and Dublin under the Georges, 1714-1830 (London, 1936) deal primarily with the gentry with only occasional reference to the peasantry. There is considerable material on emigration in the Letters and Papers of William Smith O'Brien (MSS., N.L.I.), and Robert Bennet Forbes' Voyage of the James- town on Her Errand of Mercy (Boston, 1847) contains a graphic account of the famine. Much undigested information on Irish politics at the turn of the nineteenth century is scattered through R. R. Mad- den's United Irishmen . .. (New York, 1916) and the collection of his papers on the subject in Trinity College, Dublin. Rossa's Recol- lections, 1858 to 1898. . . . (Mariner's Harbor, N. Y., 1898) and Irish Rebels in English Prisons ... (New York, 1880) are auto- biographies of Jeremiah O'Donovan-Rossa, a Fenian, with general
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reflections on the life of the Irish in the United States; and Thomas D'Arcy McGee's History of the Irish Settlers . .. (Boston, 1852) and Edward Everett Hale's Letters on Irish Emigration . . . (Bos- ton, 1852) are contemporary accounts worth consulting because of the familiarity of their authors with their subjects.
The GERMAN background is compactly discussed in John Harold Clapham's Economic Development of France and Germany . .. (Cambridge, 1936) ; and Marcus Lee Hansen carefully describes the economic causes of the migrations of the Fifties in "Revolutions of 1848 and German Emigration" (Journal of Economic and Business History, II). René LeConte summarizes the legal aspects of the movement in La Politique de l'Allemagne en matière d'émigration (Paris, 1921) but for a more detailed treatment one must still consult the essays in Auswanderung und Auswanderungspolitik in Deutsch- land ... (Leipzig, 1892) edited by Eugen von Philippovich. Albert B. Faust's German Element in the United States, with Special Refer- ence to Its Political, Moral, Social and Educational Influence (New York, 1927) is a reliable though sometimes intemperate account of the Germans in America, with emphasis on the leading personalities. The discussion of politics in Ernest Bruncken's German Political Refugees in the United States . .. (s.l., 1904) is valuable; and Franz Löher's Geschichte und Zustände der Deutschen in Amerika (Cincinnati, 1847) is a contemporary history of high order.
Although Howard Mumford Jones' excellent America and French Culture, 1750-1848 (Chapel Hill, 1927) has a broader scope, most studies of the FRENCH have dealt with political refugees of the revo- lutionary period. The story of later French immigrants is still largely untold. On the eighteenth-century migrations, Frances S. Childs' French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790-1800 . . . (Balti- more, 1940) supplements J. G. Rosengarten's French Colonists and Exiles in the United States (Philadelphia, 1907), but deals primarily with Philadelphia. Leo F. Ruskowski's French Emigré Priests in the United States (1791-1815) ... (Washington, 1940) adds little to earlier works. The best account of this movement, on the whole, is in the relevant sections of Fernand Baldensperger's Mouvement des idées dans l'émigration française . . . (Paris, 1924).
The material on ITALIAN immigration is scarce. Robert F. Foerster's Italian Emigration of Our Times (Cambridge, 1919) hardly deals with this period. Paulo G. Brenna's Storia dell'emigra- zione italiana . . . (Roma, 1928) is brief and superficial. Giovanni Schiavo's Italians in America before the Civil War . . . (New York, 1934) is an exhaustive compilation but deals primarily with person- alities. Details on the movement can be found only in the ill-
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organized volumes of Leone Carpi's Delle colonie e dell'emigrazione d'Italiani all'estero . . . (Milano, 1874).
Florence Edith Janson's Background of Swedish Immigration, 1840-1930 . . (Chicago, 1931) is excellent and Theodore C. Blegen's Norwegian Migration to America, 1825-1860 (Northfield, 1931) is adequate. Marcus Lee Hansen deals with some phases of the movement from Canada in Mingling of the Canadian and Ameri- can Peoples . . . (New Haven, 1940) and in "Second Colonization of New England" (New England Quarterly, II) ; but the Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Assembly Appointed to In- quire into the Causes . .. of the Emigration . . . from Lower Canada to the United States . . . (Montreal, 1849), though essen- tial, has been too often overlooked.
V. OTHER HISTORIES
The Memorial History of Boston . . . 1630-1880 . . . (Boston, 1880) edited by Justin Winsor is the most valuable of the numerous GENERAL HISTORIES. The articles are uneven in quality and some- times do not hang together well, but most are competently written and are not yet outdated. By and large, other works in this category deal with social history in the limited sense. Mary Caroline Craw- ford's Romantic Days in Old Boston . .. (Boston, 1910) is more sober than its title. Samuel Adams Drake's Old Landmarks and His- toric Personages of Boston . . . (Boston, 1873) is almost purely antiquarian, as is the Town of Roxbury ... (Boston, 1905) by Francis S. Drake; but both are accurate and interesting. The similar works of Gillespie and Simonds on South Boston and of Hunnewell on Charlestown can also be used with profit.
The evolution of the municipal GOVERNMENT and of its DEPART- MENTS in their first thirty years may be traced in the Municipal His- tory of . .. Boston ... (Boston, 1852) by Josiah Quincy, the first mayor. The municipal institutions are conventionally described in James M. Bugbee's City Government of Boston . . . (Baltimore, 1887). The history of the police receives sprightly treatment in Police Records and Recollections; or, Boston by Daylight and Gas- light ... (Boston, 1873) by Edward H. Savage, himself a constable at one time. The annals of other city departments are given by Arthur Wellington Brayley in The Complete History of the Boston Fire Department . (Boston, 1889) and Schools and Schoolboys of Old Boston . (Boston, 1894). The relationships of the me- tropolis to the communities around it are analyzed in George Herbert McCaffrey's Political Disintegration and Reintegration of Metropoli- tan Boston (MS., H.C.L.), a carefully prepared doctoral dissertation.
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The COMMERCIAL HISTORY of Boston has been ably treated in Samuel Eliot Morison's Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783- 1860 (Boston, 1921). Contemporary analyses by E. H. Derby (1850) and James H. Lanman (1844) may be found in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, X, XXIII. E. S. Chesbrough, the City Engineer, prepared a useful Tabular Repre- sentation of the Present Condition of Boston . .. (Boston, 1851) which covers a wide variety of topics; and John Macgregor's Progress of America . .. to the Year 1846 (London, 1847) contains a mass of miscellaneous statistics.
There is no satisfactory INDUSTRIAL HISTORY of Boston, Massa- chusetts, or New England. Victor S. Clark's History of Manufac- tures in the United States (Washington, 1916-1929) and Emerson D. Fite's Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War (New York, 1910) contain some references to the city's indus- tries, but their generalizations are not always valid for Boston. The History of Labour in the United States (New York, 1918-26), edited by John R. Commons, Norman Ware's Industrial Worker, 1840- I860 (Boston, 1924), Isaac A. Hourwich's Immigration and Labor (New York, 1922), and Edith Abbott's Women in Industry . . . (New York, 1913) are excellent studies dealing with aspects of industrial labor in this period and have some data relevant to the problems of Boston. Scattered material may also be found in Albert Aftalion's study of the clothing industries, in Raymond McFarland's study of the fisheries, in Blanche E. Hazard on shoes, Caroline F. Ware on cottons, Paul T. Cherrington and Arthur Harri- son Cole on woolens, Lura Woodside Watkins on glass, Jesse Eliphalet Pope on clothing, and Paul L. Vogt on sugar. But the most impor- tant source of information on the history of individual companies was a series of industrial compendia; C. L. Fleischmann's Erwerbs- zweige . . . (Stuttgart, 1850), Edwin T. Freedley, United States Mercantile Guide. Leading Pursuits and Leading Men . . . (Phila- delphia, 1856), volume III of J. Leander Bishop's History of Ameri- can Manufactures . . . (Philadelphia, 1868), Eighty Years Progress of the United States: a Family Record of American Industry . . . (Hartford, 1869), Great Industries of the United States . . . (Hart- ford, 1872) edited by Horace Greeley, and C. M. Depew's One Hun- dred Years of American Commerce ... (New York, 1895) contain descriptions of numerous concerns available nowhere else. One can find hostile comments on Boston's wealthy in "Our First Men": a Calendar of Wealth ... (Boston, 1846), and friendly ones in A. Forbes and J. W. Greene, Rich Men of Massachusetts . .. (Boston, 1851) or in Aristocracy of Boston . . . (Boston, 1848).
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The materials on the INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT of the city are abundant and familiar. The Bostonians who participated in the "flowering" were extremely self-conscious, wrote a good deal about themselves and their ideas, and, in addition, found frequent biog- raphers. Toward the end of the last century when interest in this group reached a peak, it received friendly and sympathetic, if often uncritical, treatment at the hands of the generation which had been its students. Octavius Brooks Frothingham and others produced a succession of biographies which breathed a pious veneration for a bygone golden age, but which often embodied the results of sound scholarship and patient research. More recent biographers have been more detached and have brought broader perspectives to their work. Henry Steele Commager's Theodore Parker ... (Boston, 1936), for example, contains little that is "new" but paints a vivid and appealing portrait through an understanding examination of its sub- ject's social background.
The POLITICAL history of the city can hardly be separated from that of the state of which it was capital. The Commonwealth History of Massachusetts (New York, 1930), edited by A. B. Hart, contains some articles of value and Samuel Eliot Morison's brief History of the Constitution of Massachusetts ... (Boston, 1917) is useful. Two thorough works cover the specific issues of this period. Arthur B. Darling's Political Changes in Massachusetts, 1824-1848 (New Haven, 1925), and William G. Bean's Party Transformation in Massachusetts with Special Reference to the Antecedents of Re- publicanism 1848-1860 (MS. doctoral dissertation, H.C.L., sum- marized in "Puritan versus Celt 1850-1860," New England Quarterly, VII, 70 ff.) trace the impact of new issues upon party structure in scholarly detail. Both, however, labor under the handicap of an untenable thesis. Their attempt to impose a sectional pattern upon Massachusetts politics is hardly successful, and is contradicted by much of their own material; other lines of division were much more important than those between east and west. Edith E. Ware's Politi- cal Opinion in Massachusetts during the Civil War and Reconstruc- tion ... (New York, 1916) is a conventional work which fails to prove that the State was never anti-slavery, and contributes little of value.
Three newspapermen have left valuable comments on the political scene in Massachusetts. William S. Robinson's "Warrington" Pen- Portraits ... (Boston, 1877) contains the penetrating observations of one familiar with all the complexities of state politics in the fifties. George S. Merriam's Life and Times of Samuel Bowles (New York, 1885) is a biography with copious extracts from the correspondence
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of the editor of the Springfield Republican; and Benjamin P. Shilla- ber of the Democratic Post has recalled his "Experiences During Many Years" for the New England Magazine, VIII, IX.
Bostonians of the period left ample stores of papers and memoirs which were turned into biographies. Josiah Quincy's Figures of the Past from the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston, 1883) contains a series of charming vignettes in which his most prominent contempo- raries are etched with real understanding; it would be difficult, for instance, to find a shrewder appraisal of Edward Everett than that which appears in the story of his meeting with a French prince. The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis ... (Boston, 1913) is a careful study of one mayor of the city by Samuel Eliot Morison; and the Papers and Correspondence of another, John Prescott Bigelow, are in the H.C.L. Also in the H.C.L. is the correspondence of Charles Sumner whose pre-war career is most sympathetically treated in Archibald H. Grimke's Life . (New York, 1892). The cam- paign Life of Henry Wilson . (Boston, 1872) by Jonathan B. Mann is the only formal account; but there are large elements of the autobiographical in Wilson's History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (Boston, 1872). Fred H. Harrington gives a very unsympathetic, though probably not unjust, account of "Nathaniel Prentiss Banks . . . " in the New England Quarterly, IX. Ben Butler has received no adequate discussion; one must still consult his Auto- biography . . . (Boston, 1892). Henry Greenleaf Pearson's Life of John A. Andrew . (Boston, 1904) is a thorough account of the Civil War governor.
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS have received occasional treatment and some of their prominent men have found biographers. James Bernard Cullen's Story of the Irish in Boston . . . (Boston, 1890) is a com- pilation of ill-assorted data on Irish institutions and personalities, but is the only work of its kind. The best studies refer to a later period. Americans in Process . . . (Boston, 1902) and City Wilder- ness .. . (Boston, 1898) are cooperative investigations of the South and West Ends of Boston at the opening of the Twentieth Century, edited by Robert A. Woods. They contain some material on the his- torical background but are permeated with a settlement house atti- tude toward their subjects. Frederick A. Bushee's Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston . .. (New York, 1903) deals with the same period but is almost purely statistical and shows remarkably little insight. The life of Thomas D'Arcy McGee is narrated ex- haustively but dully by Isabel Skelton (Gardenvale, 1924), and rap- turously by Mrs. J. Sadlier in a "Biographical Sketch" that prefaces his Poems ... (New York, 1869). Andrew Carney, the only other
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Irishman to receive formal treatment, is the subject of a sketch by the Rev. G. C. Treacy in the Historical Records and Studies of the American Catholic Historical Society, XIII. Among the Germans, Karl Heinzen has written his own biography, Erlebtes . . . (Boston, 1874) and the physician Marie Zakrzewska gives the story of her life in A Practical Illustration of "Woman's Right to Labor" ed. by C. H. Dall (Boston, 1860). Lorenzo Papanti, the Italian dancing master, is described by Charles F. Reed in the Proceedings of the Bostonian Society . .. 1928; and the Negress, Mrs. Chloe Spear, is the subject of a Memoir . (Boston, 1832) by a "Lady of Boston."
Additional material on the Negroes may be found in George W. Crawford's monograph on Prince Hall and His Followers . . . (New York, 1914) and in the publications on Negro Masonry by Lewis Hayden. There is some data on Boston in W. H. Siebert's Under- ground Railroad ... (New York, 1898), in Volumes Thirteen and Fourteen of the collection of his manuscripts in H.C.L., and in Charles H. Wesley's Negro Labor in the United States . . . (New York, 1927). Material on legal status may be found in Volume IV of Helen T. Catterall's Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro ... (Washington, 1936).
CATHOLIC HISTORIES have been concerned primarily with specific institutions and with personalities. But within these limits a good deal of material is available. The Rev. James Fitton's Sketches of the Establishment of the Church in New England (Boston, 1872) and the more ambitious History of the Catholic Church in the New England States (Boston, 1899), edited by the Very Rev. William Byrne and others, supplement John Gilmary Shea's detailed chronicle of the History of the Catholic Church within the . . . United States . . . (New York, 1886). Thomas D'Arcy McGee's Catholic History of North America . . . (Boston, 1855) has more value for light on its author than for its contributions to serious history. Within a narrower field, the Rev. Arthur J. Riley's temperate and scholarly Catholicism in New England to 1788 . .. (Washington, 1936) is one of the best works on any phase of the subject. There is material on the early history of the Church in Boston in the "Catholic Recol- lections" of Samuel Breck, American Catholic Historical Researches, XII; but the most careful account is given in E. Percival Merritt's "Sketches of the Three Earliest Roman Catholic Priests in Boston," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXV. Bishop Fenwick is discussed in an article by Robert H. Lord in the Catholic Historical Review, XXII; and Bishop Fitzpatrick in one by Isaac T. Hecker in the Catholic World, XLV. Father Hecker himself is the
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