USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 4
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30
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
spoken in Boston.2 These foreigners, however, were just strays; and the reasons for their coming derived from personal con- tingencies rather than from great social causes for mass emigra- tion. To their ranks were added, from time to time, deserters from foreign ships in port, for whom American wages and American freedom weighed more heavily than the obligations of contract or the claims of loyalty.3 More respectable incre- ments came from the merchants and consuls who form a for- eign nucleus in any commercial community.4 Occasionally groups arrived. Thus when 800 English veterans, out-pen- sioners of Chelsea Hospital, settled in the eastern United States, some came to Boston.5 But the great waves of European migra- tion, with one exception, caused scarcely a ripple in the placid stream of Boston life. Only one country directed a dislodged population to a city where no promise dwelled; elsewhere events promoted the departure of those only who could choose their destination more prudently.
Between 1815 and 1865 profound changes in the economic, social and political life of many communities up-rooted some 5,000,000 people from the continent of Europe. The most di-
2 Benevolent Fraternity of Churches (Boston), Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Executive Committee . .. 1860 (Boston, 1860), 8. For examples of each of the nationalities cited, cf. Dissertation Copy, 51-53, and the references there cited.
3 Cf. a bundle of correspondence on this subject in Reale Archivio di Stato, Naples, Politica, Fasc. I, package 17. For Norwegian deserters, cf. Theodore C. Blegen, Norwegian Migration to America, 1825-1860 (Northfield, Minnesota, 1931),33I.
4 For a list of merchants, cf., "British Mercantile Houses Established in Boston," Grattan to Bidwell, November 30, 1848, British Consular Correspond- ence, F. O. 5/488, no. 6, enclosures; also La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Voyage dans les États-Unis d'Amérique . . . (Paris, An VII [1799]), III, 139. For some Scotch merchants, cf. Ethel S. Bolton, ed., Topliff's Travels, Letters from Abroad in the Years 1828 and 1829 . . . (Boston, 1906), 15, 16. For the Marquis Niccolo Reggio and other Italian merchants, cf. Boston Pilot, July II, 1846; Giovanni Schiavo, Italians in America before the Civil War . .. (New York, 1934), 226; Reale Archivio di Stato, Naples, Politica, Fasc. I, package 15; Leone Carpi, Delle Colonie e dell' emigrazione d'Italiani all'estero .. . (Milano, 1874), II, 230 ff.
5 Baker to Consul Skinner, January 14, 1817, British Embassy Archives, F. O. 115/27, f. 185; Joseph Jennings to Chargé d'Affaires, August 18, 1832, British Consular Correspondence, F. O. 5/277.
3I
THE PROCESS OF ARRIVAL, 1790-1865
rect cause of this migration from western and central Europe was the dissatisfaction of large groups of people with their political and legal status. Many abandoned their homes be- cause they despaired of improving their circumstances where they were, while others were forced to flee precisely because they sought to alter conditions. During the French revolu- tionary period, cautious noblemen, victims of the fighting in La Vendée, disillusioned Feuillant reformers, Girondins, Jaco- bins, Thermidorians, and, finally, Napoleonic exiles -in all between 150,000 and 200,000 - left their native country.6 At about the same time, repressive English measures following the abortive insurrection of the Society of United Irishmen under Lord Edward Fitzgerald in 1798, the failure of the uprising of 1803, and the Act of Union which joined the two kingdoms, caused many to leave Ireland.7 Thereafter, successive up- heavals in many lands produced a host of expatriates - Ger- man Burschenschaft agitators, Polish and French exiles of the thirties, French-Canadians in 1837, and French, Hungarian, Italian, German, and Irish émigrés in 1848.8
Many thus became exiles; but few became immigrants. The right of political asylum was universally recognized in western Europe 9 and a revolutionary fugitive could easily find a base close at hand where he might participate in further plots. The first French émigrés went to Turin to raise a counter-revolu-
6 Cf. Fernand Baldensperger, Mouvement des idées dans l'émigration fran- çaise . . . (Paris, 1924), I, iii; Leo Gershoy, French Revolution and Napoleon (New York, 1933), 131; Emmanuel Vingtrinier, La Contre-Revolution . (Paris, 1924), I, 36, 37, II, 269; Dissertation Copy, 55, 56.
7 Cf. R. R. Madden, United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times, Newly Edited (New York, 1916), II, 30 ff., 101, 261, III, 10; R. R. Madden, Connexion be- tween ... Ireland and England ... (Dublin, 1845), 116, 132; Marcus Lee Hansen, Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860 . .. (Cambridge, 1940), 65, 66; R. R. Madden, Life and Times of Robert Emmet (New York, 1856), 59 ff.
8 Cf. Ernest Bruncken, German Political Refugees in the United States . . . (s.l., 1904), II, 12; Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Assembly Appointed to Inquire into the Causes . . . of the Emigration . . . from Lower Canada to the United States . .. (Montreal, 1849), 5; Marcus Lee Hansen, Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples ... (New Haven, 1940), 115 ff .; Hansen, Atlantic Migration, 122 ff.
9 Cf. Max J. Kohler, "Right of Asylum with Particular Reference to the Alien," American Law Review, May, June, 1917, LI, 399-401.
32
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
tionary army, while most of their successors concentrated in the Rhineland, on the Austrian frontier, and in England, from which points almost three-quarters eventually returned to France.1º Similarly the Irish émigrés from the beginning looked first to France for asylum. When the United Irishmen decided that "where freedom is, there should our country be," it was "the thoughts of lovely France" that cheered them.11 The German radicals tried always to stay as close to home as pos- sible, using nearby territory as a base for attacks against the Metternich system; whole colonies developed in Alsace-Lor- raine, Switzerland, and England.12 And later French, Italian, and Hungarian refugees centered their activities in London where they plotted under Ledru-Rollin, Mazzini, and Kossuth.13 Those only came to America who gave up active revolutionary projects to start life anew.14 Nevertheless, enough entered the United States to justify the constant boast of Americans that "the downtrodden . .. Pole ... the learned ... German . the cultivated and ardent Italian . . . bends hitherward his expatriated steps, as towards a shrine of social and public safety, to contemplate institutions of which he has only read." 15
Of the 10,000 to 25,000 early French refugees who fled to America, however, few chose to live in Boston.16 Between 1794 and 1809 occasional groups did arrive from France and from the disturbed districts of the French West Indies. And isolated
10 Vingtrinier, op. cit., I, 69; M. F. de Montrol, Histoire de l'émigration . . . (Paris, 1827), 45, 104, 273, 283, 305; Le Comte de Sainte-Colombe, Catalogue des émigrés français à Fribourg ... (Lyon, 1884), passim; Charles Robert, "Les Émigrés Bretons ," Revue de Bretagne, de Vendée & d'Anjou .. , Juin, 1898, XIX, 427 ff.
11 Thomas Atkinson, Hibernian Eclogues . .. (Dublin, 1791), 14; Madden, United Irishmen, III, 295, IV, 151; Thomas Addis Emmet, Memoir of Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet (New York, 1915), II, 61-80.
12 Otto Wiltberger, Die deutschen politischen Flüchtlinge in Strassburg, 1830- 1849 (Berlin, 1909), 8 ff .; Karl Heinzen, Erlebtes. zweiter Theil: nach meiner Exilirung (Gesammelte Schriften, vierter Band) (Boston, 1874), 54, 326, 328, 356. 13 Alvin R. Calman, Ledru-Rollin après 1848 et les proscrits français en An- gleterre (Paris, 1921), 35, 93, 105.
14 Cf., e.g., Heinzen, op. cit., 455.
15 George Ticknor Curtis, Rights of Conscience . .. (Boston, 1842), 18.
16 Baldensperger, op. cit., I, 105, n. 1; Frances S. Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States . .. (Baltimore, 1940), passim.
33
THE PROCESS OF ARRIVAL, 1790-1865
individuals appeared from time to time. Jean Baptiste Julien, for instance, opened a "Restorator" at the corner of Milk and Congress Streets where he concocted for the first time the Consommé Julien and received from Brillat-Savarin a recipe for eggs "brouillés au fromage" which "fit fureur." 17 But most French immigrants of that period either went to Philadelphia or thought of America as the land of the noble savage and went far from Boston in their search for primitivism. In 1848, later French revolutionaries appeared, but on the whole the town was only slightly affected by this emigration.18
Fugitives from other political upheavals of the mid-nine- teenth century contributed more heavily to Boston's population. The cultural center of America attracted considerable numbers of intellectuals and professionals, though they were continually warned that there was no room for educated classes in the United States.19 Thus, the Germans, Karl Beck and Carl Follen, came to Harvard in 1825, and Francis Lieber arrived in Boston in 1827 to teach gymnastics.20 The fiasco of 1848 drove several large contingents to the city, the most prom- inent individual being Heinzen.21 And while most Irish polit- ical refugees concentrated in New York - an early center of
17 F. B., "Le Séjour de Brillat-Savarin aux États-unis," Revue de Littérature Comparée, Janvier, 1922, II, 95; Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture, 1750-1848 (Chapel Hill, 1927), 304; J. G. Rosengarten, French Colo- nists and Exiles in the United States (Philadelphia, 1907), 103; Samuel Adams Drake, Old Landmarks . .. of Boston . .. (Boston, 1873), 270, 271. 18 Cf. Boston Selectmen Minutes from 1787 through 1798 (Report of Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, XXVII), Boston City Documents, 1896, no. 81, pp. 271, 272 ; Jackson to Canning, November 19, 1809, British Consular Correspondence, F. O. 5/64, no. 20; MacDonough to Grenville, July 24, 1794, ibid., F. O. 5/6; Francis S. Drake, Town of Roxbury ... Its History and Antiquities ... (Boston, 1905), 123, 124; Baldensperger, op. cit., I, 107 ff .; Edmund Patten, Glimpse at the United States . .. (London, 1853), 14; Jones, op. cit., 135, 167.
10 Cf., e.g., letters to the Mayor of Boston asking for aid from A. A. Dieffenbach, "stud. theolog." of Berlin, September 18, 1850, and from F. Guil- lerez, December 13, 1849 (John Prescott Bigelow Papers, 1723-1865 [MSS., H. C. L.], Box VI) ; Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker (Boston, 1936), III ff.
20 Bruncken, op. cit., 13; A. B. Faust, German Element in the United States . (New York, 1927), II, 214 ff. . 21 Heinzen, op. cit., 503.
34
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
anti-British activity - many nevertheless settled in Boston. Walter Coxe, an old revolutionary, one of the first, was joined after 1848 by Phelim Lynch and by B. S. Treanor, who be- came leaders of the Boston Irish community.22 Among others in this category who struck roots in the city were some Poles in 1831 and in 1834, some Italians, and some Hungarians who came with Kossuth and stayed on.23
Much more influential than the political reasons for emigra- tion, however, were the social and economic factors that trans- formed Europe in the century after 1750. Most fundamental was the fabulous increase in population. Before 1750, years in which births exceeded deaths had alternated with years in which deaths exceeded births, while over long periods of time the number of people remained fairly stationary.24 After 1750, primarily because of a decrease in mortality among children less than ten, the population mounted steadily, almost doubling in the next century. This expansion, even at the point of redundancy, was itself not enough to provoke emigration, but it was the catalytic agent which converted other economic developments into dynamic causes for mass exodus.25
Between 1750 and 1850 the Industrial Revolution destroyed the traditional handicraft industries by creating large-scale factory enterprises, and set loose countless artisans all over western Europe. The change became apparent first in England where a series of inventions after 1785 gradually converted the small-scale, individually-operated, domestic textile indus- tries into large-scale undertakings manned by a proletariat. From England it spread to France and later to Germany. In
22 Walter Coxe to Thomas Finn, December 14, 1816 in Dr. R. Robert Madden, "Collection of Papers on the History of the United Irishmen, 1790-1832" (MSS.,
T. C. D.), I; Irish-American (New York), May 30, 1857, June II, 1853.
23 Daily Evening Transcript, November II, 12, 1831; Samuel A. Drake, op. cit., 264; Boston Pilot, February 2, 1856, June 12, 1852, December 10, 1853. 24 Robert R. Kuczynski, Population Movements (Oxford, 1936), 23.
25 A. M. Carr-Saunders, World Population ... (Oxford, 1936), 30; Walter F. Willcox, ed., International Migrations, II (New York, 1931), 49, 78; Donald H. Taft, Human Migration ... (New York, 1936), 86; A. M. Carr-Saunders, Population Problem, a Study in Human Evolution (Oxford, 1922), 298-300, 308.
35
THE PROCESS OF ARRIVAL, 1790-1865
both England and France the displaced found employment in factories as paid laborers, so that the shift in population was chiefly from rural to urban regions, with little effect upon external migration. The British government, furthermore, dis- couraged any tendency of skilled laborers to quit the country. The Act of 1782 and the Order in Council of April, 1795, for- bade a large variety of workers to leave. Although these re- strictions were sometimes circumvented by vessels which cleared for a British port but stopped at New York or Boston instead, they remained fairly effective until repealed in 1824.26 Even after the removal of legal impediments, emigration was selective in nature and limited in quantity. Not the depressed miner or factory operative, but the independent craftsmen whose standards were steadily lowered by the new industrial system, sought out new lands beyond the sea. Thus, in the 1840's, the London Tailors' Union offered to assist the emigra- tion of 7,000 unemployed tailors, and in Paisley 3,000 com- bined to secure aid for the same purpose.27 1132120
In Germany the exodus of displaced artisans was consider- ably more marked than in England. Throughout this period Germany was industrially dependent upon England and France, producing foodstuffs to supply their industrial cities, and tak- ing in return their finished products. The influx of machine- made goods "when England poured her yarn ... into the Hanse towns after Waterloo" destroyed German handicrafts and menaced the existence of many artisans.28 In spite of a
26 Cf. Robert Holditch, Emigrant's Guide to the United States of America . (London, 1818), 40; Grenville to Hammond, April 15, 1795, British Em- bassy Archives, F.O. 115/4; Manners to Castlereagh, November 27, 1818, British Consular Correspondence, F. O. 5/135; Hansen, Atlantic Migration, 97; [John Talbot], History of North America . . . Including .. . Information on . . . Emigrating to That Country (Leeds, 1820), II, 316; Carr-Saunders, World Population, 182.
27 Boston Merkur, December 26, 1846; A. H. Simpson to W. S. O'Brien, July 17, 1840 (W. S. O'Brien Papers and Letters, 1819-1854, MSS., N. L. I.), VI, no. 749; also letters from Scotch weavers in 1840 and 1841 (ibid., VI, nos. 737, 739, 777) ; Edwin C. Guillet, The Great Migration ... (New York, 1937), 29.
28 John Harold Clapham, Economic Development of France and Germany (Cambridge, 1928), 87; Gustav Schmoller, Zur Geschichte der deutschen
36
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
steadily increasing population the period between 1835 and 1860 saw a decline in the number of masters in all but a few trades.29 Because the machines that discharged them were in England, these workers could find no new employment in Germany. They had little choice but to emigrate.30
English domination stifled the development of the factory system in Ireland and ruined the industries that had existed before the Union. During the eighteenth century independent craftsmen had, despite British hostility, developed flourishing trades in Cork, Dublin, Limerick, and other Irish cities. But the Act of Union was almost immediately disastrous. With the shift of the capital to London, most of the gentry left Ireland, taking with them the market for Irish manufactures.31 Thereafter the English parliament persistently retarded the growth of native industry, already handicapped by the de- pression of the Napoleonic Wars. As a result the Industrial Revolution never reached Ireland, the number of artisans de- clined steadily, and many manufacturers who had "hitherto been the established employers of numerous workmen" were themselves impoverished "by the stagnation of trade." 32 Faced with pauperization or emigration, 600 of those "who compose
Kleingewerbe im 19. Jahrhundert (Halle, 1870), 661, 671; Eugen von Philippo- vich, ed., Auswanderung und Auswanderungspolitik in Deutschland . . . (Leip- zig, 1892), IIO.
29 Schmoller, op. cit., 105, IIO.
30 Cf. Marcus L. Hansen, "Revolutions of 1848 and German Emigration," Journal of Economic and Business History, August, 1930, II, 656.
31 Cf. George O'Brien, Economic History of Ireland in the Seventeenth Cen- tury (Dublin, 1919), 118, 119, 221; George O'Brien, Economic History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1918), 269 ff .; George O'Brien, Economic History of Ireland from the Union to the Famine (London, 1921), 297 ff., 415 ff .; William Forbes Adams, Ireland and Irish Emigration to the New World from 1815 to the Famine ... (New Haven, 1932), 57; J. Dunsmore Clarkson, Labour and Nationalism in Ireland (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, CXX, no. 266, New York, 1925), 23.
32 [Rev. Gilbert Austin], Charity Sermon for the Sick and Indigent Room- keepers Preached at St. Peter's, Dublin ... February 19, 1797 . . . (Dublin, 1797), 29; cf. also (Rev. William Hickey), State of the Poor of Ireland .. . (Carlow, 1820), 20; Clarkson, op. cit., 58, 59, 101, 106. For a list of industries
in the neighborhood of Dublin which were ruined and whose "protestant in- habitants fled to America," cf., A Freeman's Letter to the Right Hon. Robert Peel on the Present State of the City of Dublin ... (Dublin, n.d.), 8, 9.
37
THE PROCESS OF ARRIVAL, 1790-1865
the middle ranks of life, and who are the most useful members of society" left in 1797 alone, and the annual number of such emigrants mounted steadily thereafter.33
Coterminous with these industrial changes were a whole pm series of rural changes, generically termed the agricultural revolution, which transformed western European agriculture from a communal activity of peasants on small-scale holdings, to a large-scale capitalist enterprise with a paid proletariat as its labor force. First manifest in the midland and northern counties of England, this conversion derived from the develop- ment of new agricultural techniques and the expansion of urban markets. Successive enclosure acts after 1750 imple- mented the transition by breaking up open fields and replacing them with contiguous holdings. The immediate result was the displacement of innumerable agriculturists who held their land by customary rights but could display no legal title. Further- more, the position of those who remained on the land was weakened. Large-scale scientific farming, now feasible, put small owners at a disadvantage, and eventually forced many to forfeit their farms.3ª The dispossessed could emigrate to the United States, Canada, or Australia, or they could go to the rapidly expanding cities. England's swelling population, however, set a limit to the number who found employment in urban industries. As early as 1826 a select committee com- plained that the country was burdened with too much labor, and that the range of industrial opportunities was quickly narrowing.35 Under these circumstances, those who had man- aged to salvage anything from the collapse of the old agricul-
33 William Warren, Political and Moral Pamphlet ... Addressed to the . .. Lord Lieutenant ... (Cork, 1797), 6; The Causes of Discontents in Ire- land, and Remedies Proposed ... (s.l., n.d. [Dublin, 1823]), 46; Statement of the Proceedings of the Western Committee for the Relief of the Irish Poor . . . (London, 1831), 37.
34 For the whole problem, cf. Élie Halévy, History of the English People . .. (Harmondsworth, 1937), I, Bk. II, 31 ff., 37 ff., 58 ff., 70 ff .; J. L. and Barbara Hammond, Village Labourer, 1760-1832 . . . (London, 1912), 71.
35 Stanley C. Johnson, History of Emigration from the United Kingdom to North America ... (London, 1913), 16; A. M. Carr-Saunders, Population (London, 1925), 8.
38
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
tural system, those who still possessed the means for building a new life, chose to migrate. The paupers, the broken in spirit, drifted to the towns.36
In southwestern Germany and in Scandinavia similar inno- vations drove many from their native soil. Unlike the peasants of Prussia and Saxony who in 1800 still retained the servile status acquired after the collapse of the uprisings of the six- teenth century, those of Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, and the Rhineland were free.37 In both Norway and Sweden the bøndar, the predominant farmers, were also freeholders with extensive, almost aristocratic rights.38 In all free areas, hold- ings had shrunk remorselessly through centuries of division and redivision, and tiny plots were a chronic source of discon- tent among those who found no opportunities at home in a rapidly growing population. Farms had become so small that further division among several heirs was economically im- possible. Younger sons could either consent to a reduction in status by becoming day-laborers, or, unhampered by servile obligations, seek fresh opportunities elsewhere.39
Decreasing mortality and the consequent rising population between 1800 and 1865 further limited opportunities in the already circumscribed Scandinavian economy. But the situa- tion became critical in the 1840's with the spread of enclosures and the displacement of countless bøndar. In that decade the movement advanced rapidly "until the greater part of Sweden south of Norrland and Dalarne had changed village communal ownership to individual farms." This transition inordinately stimulated the volume of emigration which had already started ten years earlier. Thousands of ousted farmers rushed to the
36 Cf. Paul Mantoux, Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1928), 186.
37 Cf. Max Sering, Deutsche Agrarpolitik ... (Leipzig, 1934), 26; also Clap- ham, op. cit., 30 and the end map, "German Empire - Agrarian."
38 Cf. Florence Edith Janson, Background of Swedish Immigration, 1840-1930 (Social Science Monographs, no. 15, Chicago, 1931), 43 ff.
39 Cf. Willcox, op. cit., II, 315, 341; Hansen, Atlantic Migration, 211 ff .; Blegen, op. cit., 82, 123, 168 ff .; Janson, op. cit., 40, 55, 56; Robert R. Kuczynski, Balance of Births and Deaths (New York, 1928), I, 98, 99.
39
THE PROCESS OF ARRIVAL, 1790-1865
seaports to get off to America. Everywhere in Norway and Sweden the fairly well-to-do peasants surrendered their homes and sought elsewhere the opportunities denied them by the change in the system of cultivation.40
In Germany increasing pressure on the old agricultural sys- tem from new markets for grain and food-stuffs made the situation more acute. The extension of the market was particu- larly hard upon the southwestern peasant, for it created a tendency toward higher prices and higher rents, made small- scale farming comparatively unprofitable, and stimulated the application of large-scale techniques to agriculture. As a result the next fifty years witnessed a displacement of population similar to that in Sweden.41 But in Germany as in Scandinavia there were no booming Manchesters or Birminghams into whose factories the peasants could go.42 Emigration was the only, the inevitable, alternative. After the turn of the century restric- tions upon leaving gradually slackened, the prohibition being relaxed as early as 1804 in Bavaria and, after the Wars of Liberation, elsewhere in the southwest. The removal of these restraints and the absence of servile shackles to the land, released a swelling tide, checked only temporarily by the Napoleonic Wars.43 Peace in 1815 brought rapid acceleration, and the agricultural depression of 1816-17 carried the move- ment to abnormally high levels.44 It developed steadily in the next two decades. In 1846-47 and 1852-55 crop failures in Bavaria and Baden, inevitably accompanied by high prices, further stimulated peasant migration.45 By that time the web
40 Janson, op. cit., 49 ff., 14; Blegen, op. cit., 19.
41 Imre Ferenczi, International Migrations, I (New York, 1929), 116; Willcox, op. cit., II, 342, 347.
42 For the slow growth of German industry, cf. Clapham, op. cit., 86 ff.
43 Cf. Philippovich, op. cit., 6, 111 ; René Le Conte, La Politique de l'Allemagne en matière d'émigration (Paris, 1921), 7, 9 ff.
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