USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Boston's immigrants, 1790-1865 : a study in acculturation > Part 7
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Viewed according to the nativity of those employed, this heterogeneity was particularly significant, for it reflected the economic health of any group within the city. A high degree of dispersion denoted the presence of considerable numbers of trained workmen, retailers, and merchants who conformed closely to the city's economic pattern. A low degree indicated a deficiency of such elements and presaged a period of difficulty in adjustment.
Table XIV, which gives the number of employed persons in 1850 with the number of occupations and the average number of persons per occupation of each nationality, proves that a general average for the entire city actually understates the extent of diversification. All nativities but one had far fewer persons per occupation than the city as a whole. The average
at another date found a total of 138,788 ("Report and Tabular Statement of the Censors ... ," Boston City Documents, 1850, no. 42, p. 30).
+ Cf. infra, Tables XIII, XIV.
5 Cf. infra, Table XIV.
6 Cf. supra, 12 ff.
62
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
varied almost directly with the number employed. Massachu- setts with 13,553 had an average of 20.53; the rest of New England with 7,986 had an average of 14.16; British North America with 1,38I had an average of 7.31; and Germany with 929 had an average of 6.07.7 As the group grew smaller, its miscellaneous character progressively increased. The Irish formed the one exception. Their average, twice as high as any other group's, alone approached that of the entire city. While the 13,553 persons of Massachusetts birth worked at over 660 different occupations and New England's 7,986 at 564, Ireland's 14,595 were confined to only 362.8
The unusual degree of Irish concentration in an economic organization where dispersion was the rule arose from their convergence in two unskilled employments. A single occupa- tion accounted for 48 per cent of the total Irish laboring force, another for almost 15 per cent more, and a third for 7 per cent.9 In each of the other nativity groups represented in Charts A and B, no single vocation busied more than 20 per cent of the total working population. In each, the three most popular occupations employed between 24 and 50 per cent of the total, with the remainder of the workers engaged in from forty- three (in the case of the Negroes) to 657 (in the case of Massa- chusetts) different employments. By contrast, the three most popular occupations among the Irish included more than 70 per cent of the whole, and the ten most popular accounted for more than 80 per cent, leaving only 20 per cent divided among the residual 352.10
The concentration of nearly 65 per cent of the Irish working population in two occupations was an anomaly forced upon them by the conditions of their arrival. The vast majority left their ships in East Boston without the slightest conception of
Cf. infra, Table XIV.
8 Idem.
9 Cf. infra, Chart B.
10 Cf. infra, Charts A and B. The comparison would be even more striking if the Negroes were excluded. The maximum for the three leading occupations in any other group was 30 per cent. The reasons why the Negroes come near the Irish in this respect are discussed infra, 75.
CHART A - DISTRIBUTION OF THE WORKING
POPULATION OF 1850
IRISH, MASSACHUSETTS, AND NEW ENGLAND
NATIVITY,
1000
4000 -2000 3000 5000
8 6000
7000
8000
9000
-10000
-11000
-12000
-13000
14000
F
IRELAND
MASSACHUSETTS
NEW ENGLAND
' F note to Table XIII.
LEGEND: The first ten spaces in Charts A and B represent the ten most numerous occupations within each nativity group; the eleventh represents the remainder.
CHART B- PERCENTAGE DISTRIBUTION OF THE WORKING POPULATION OF SELECTED NATIVITIES, BOSTON, 1850* % 30 50 60 10 20 40 -80
70 90 100
MASSACHUSETTS
NEW ENGLAND
UNITED
STATES
NEGRO
BRITISH
NORTH
AMÉRICA
GERMANY
ENGLAND
IRELAND
* cf. note to Table XIII ; for legend, cf., Chart A.
64
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
how they would earn a livelihood and with only enough money to keep them fed and sheltered for a week or two. "Unable to find employment or transportation elsewhere, . . . without one penny in store, the question, how they should live, was more easily put than solved." 11 Some had the way partly cleared by relatives or friends who assisted them; others managed to go west or to more prosperous eastern cities; and not a few, immediately discouraged by the "overstocked labor market," turned back to Ireland.12 But most were completely immo- bilized; the circumstances that brought them to Boston com- pelled them to remain there, to struggle on as best they could.
They faced exhausting difficulties in making a place for them- selves in the city's economic life. There was no one to help them; the hard-pressed Catholic priest and the overburdened benevolent and immigrant-aid societies could assist only a few.13 Many fell into the clutches of the "Intelligence Bureaus" and the "Swindling Shops," traders in human misery which fleeced the guileless strangers.14 More generally, the Irish relied upon their own simple ingenuity in finding employment. Tramping the crooked streets from shop to shop, they might, if they were fortunate, find someone to use their heavy labor. Frequenting the docks, watching the arrival of ships from across the water, they sometimes met a short-handed stevedore boss or wharfinger.15 They procured casual employment on the streets or in the public works that were transforming the
11 Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, Fourteenth Annual Report . . . (Bos- ton, 1848), 23, 24.
12 Cf., e.g., Irish American, October 21, 1849; Cork Examiner, July 11, 1861.
13 Cf. Edward E[verett] Hale, Letters on Irish Emigration .. . (Boston, 1852), 33.
14 Cf. Boston Merkur, June 5, 1847; Boston Pilot, September 25, 1841, Feb- ruary 7, 1857.
15 There is no way of estimating the actual number of dock laborers in the city. The term "stevedore" generally applied to the contractor who hired the labor in behalf of the merchant. Most laborers were recruited as they were needed. They were predominantly foreign by nativity, and their numbers were quite large (cf. Boston Board of Trade, Third Annual Report of the Govern- ment ... January, 1857 ... [Boston, 1857], 7; Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Massachusetts . . . 1872, Massachusetts Senate Documents, 1872, no. 180, p. 56).
65
THE ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
physical aspects of the city. But any element of selectivity was denied them. The pressing need for immediate earnings de- stroyed the possibility of choosing a job or preparing for a trade. Want swept them into the ranks of those 7,007 unskilled, insecure day laborers who informed the census takers that they were just laborers - a classification descriptive not of their function, but of their lack of function.16 Well might the good Irish priest, Dr. Cahill, lament that "the emigrants from Ireland. ... to escape the horrors ... of the emaciating poorhouse fly to this country with barely the passage money; and they have often landed. . . . [without] a single penny ! . It is a clear case that these poor friendless strangers, hav- . ing no money, must have recourse to their only means of sub- sistence - namely, street or yard laborers or house servants." 17
No other nationality depended so heavily upon unskilled work. There were 1,545 laborers in the city other than Irish, but in no group did they form a significant proportion. Among the natives no more than 5 per cent were so employed, and only the Negroes and the Germans had as much as 10 per cent. But even in these cases the actual number was small: 115 Negroes and 107 Germans.18
An employed laborer could not earn enough to maintain a family of four. And as long as the head of the Irish household obtained nothing but sporadic employment, his dependents lived in jeopardy of exchanging poverty for starvation.19 Sup-
16 The total number of laborers in the city in 1850 was 8,552, which repre- sented a significant increase over the 3,240 of 1845. The number continued to rise until 1855 when it equalled 10,402, and thereafter it declined to 9,745 in 1860 and to 9,103 in 1865. Since almost all these laborers were Irish, it is apparent that the number increased steadily with the growth of Irish immi- gration from 1845 to the early fifties and declined thereafter as the laborers were absorbed in industry (cf. infra, Tables XIII, XV; Lemuel Shattuck, Re- port to the Committee of the City Council . . . Census of Boston . . . 1845 .. . [Boston, 1846], Appendix Y, 43; Oliver Warner, Abstract of the Census of Massachusetts, 1860 [Boston, 1863], 183, 283; Oliver Warner, Abstract of the Census of Massachusetts, 1865 . . . [Boston, 1867], 133).
17 Dr. Cahill, "Seventh Letter from America 1860).
. . " (Boston Pilot, March 3, 18 Cf. infra, Table XV.
19 Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor . . . 1872, Massa- chusetts Senate Documents, 1872, no. 180, pp. 516 ff .; Chart C.
66
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
plementary earnings - no matter how small - became crucial for subsistence. The sons were first pressed into service, though youngsters had to compete with adults willing to work for boys' wages. To keep the family fed, clothed, and sheltered the women also were recruited. In Ireland they had occupied a clearly defined and important position in the cottiers' economy. That place being gone, they went off to serve at the table of strangers and bring home the bitter bread of banishment.
There was room in the comfortable households of Boston's middle classes for the Irish daughter or sister who wished to lighten her family's load by supporting herself and perhaps contributing a little something besides. There had long been an acute shortage of domestics in New England. Generation after generation of housewives had either done their own work or paid relatively high wages to natives who insisted on being "help," not servants. The supply of such labor had been ex- tremely unsatisfactory and transitory in character. Most Amer- icans "would rather want bread than serve to gain it," and farm girls in service for a few years while waiting to be mar- ried usually lacked the essential attributes of servility and loyalty.2º Under these circumstances the "Irish help" were triply welcome for their good spirits, their loyalty, and their cheap wages. In all hotels and in thousands of native homes Bridget became a familiar, indispensable figure.21 By 1850, at a conservative estimate, 2,227 Irish girls worked as domestic servants in Boston.22
20 Alfred Bunn, Old England and New England in a Series of Views . (London, 1853), I, 61.
21 Cf. Boston Pilot, August 19, 1854.
22 Cf. infra, Tables XIII, XVI. It was impossible to enumerate accurately the number of domestics employed in Boston because of deficiencies in the census (cf. infra, note to Table XVI). The figures given above and in Tables XIII and XVI are approximate and minimal, intended merely to show the relative proportion in each nativity group. An accurate count of domestics in this period appears to have been made only in the state censuses of 1845 and 1865. The former found 5,706 (Shattuck, op. cit., 84); the latter, 11,204 (Warner, Abstract of the Census of Massachusetts, 1865, 142). The figure for 1850 is probably closer to that of 1865 than to that of 1845, so that Table XVI should be scaled radically upward.
67
THE ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
For all other groups, the percentage in service was uniformly low.23 None numbered more than 10 per cent, and of these, many were governesses and house-keepers rather than menial servants.24 To some extent this preponderance of Irish domes- tics sprang from the greater percentage of females among the immigrants from Ireland; but above all, it derived from the pressing need to send women out to help support the family.
The tenuous character of their status drove the Irish into a constant search for better jobs and more secure employment. All aspired to skilled positions that would enable them to sup- port their families alone. But the reluctance to employ Irish- men in any but the lowest capacities, added to their lack of capital and of training - itself an insuperable obstacle - rig- orously excluded them from such occupations. Early attempts to ban foreigners from certain professions by law had failed,25 but by 1845 the caption "None need apply but Americans" was familiar in Boston newspaper advertisements.26 Prejudice became more intense as competition for jobs grew keener, though it proved no formidable barrier to those who had a trade to ply or a skill to offer. But while other groups filtered into the city and were accepted, the Irish remained unneeded and unabsorbed. The few who arrived with professions, or rose from the ranks of the unskilled by a gradual process of recruitment, did not leaven the mass.
The degree of their penetration into any trade varied in- versely with its desirability. Employments involving an element of personal service and therefore repugnant and degrading to Americans, quickly fell to the lot of the Irish. Many found work in the care and service of horses, the city's chief transport agent. As these trades called for menial labor of a rather low sort, few
23 Cf. infra, Table XVI.
24 Cf. references to Courrier des États-Unis (New York), cited Dissertation Copy, 123.
25 Cf., e.g., Minutes of the Selectmen's Meetings 1799 to . . . 1810 (Volume of Records Relating to the Early History of Boston, XXXIII), Boston City Documents, 1904, no. 93, P. 122.
26 Cf. Boston Pilot, June 16, 1838, June 8, 1839, February 17, 1855, Septem- ber 30, 1854.
68
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
competed with the Irish for them. By 1850, more than 300 of the 877 smiths, more than those of any other nativity group, were Irish. The hostlers and stablers were also predominantly Irish, although the stable keepers, who needed capital, were not.27 The same divergence prevailed in services to men as well as to beasts. Everywhere the waiters were Irish, while the skilled cooks were not.28 Barbers, also skilled workers, were traditionally Negroes, and the elegant and fashionable hair- dressers and coiffeurs were Frenchmen or Italians.29 With these exceptions the Irish had the service occupations almost entirely to themselves.
In the truly skilled employments, however, their percentage was low indeed. Only in the building trades did they have any opportunity at all, and that because Boston, like most American cities, was passing through a construction boom. The wealthy merchants were building grand residences down Beacon Hill and on toward the newer Back Bay. The middle classes, mov- ing out to East and South Boston, were erecting hundreds of new dwellings. By their very presence even the Irish created a demand for more housing. They preempted the slums and the low rental sections of the city, pushing out the former in- habitants and stimulating the demand for new abodes. In 1843, more than 1,118 new structures were reared, and the annual number grew thereafter.30 As a result labor was in demand. The various building trades embraced some 5 per cent (775) of the total Irish working population. This compared unfavor- ably with the 11 per cent (1,594) of Massachusetts birth and with that of the other nativities.31 But it represented skilled
27 Cf. infra, Table XIII.
28 Idem; Bunn, op. cit., I, 61, 62; Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in South and North America (London, 1853), 177.
20 Cf. infra, Table XIII; Dissertation Copy, 126.
30 Cf. "Report and Tabular Statement of the Censors . . . 1850," Boston City Documents, 1850, no. 42, p. 49; James H. Lanman, "Commerce of Boston," [Hunt's] Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, May, 1844, X, 431, 432. 31 Dissertation Copy, 445. The 4,190 persons employed in these occupations were fairly equally distributed among the various nativity groups, with the exception of the British North Americans who were abnormally concentrated in carpentry. The explanation for their unusually high percentage may be that the
69
THE ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
employment for a significant section of the Irish community by which some actually acquired enough influence and capital to become contractors and construction bosses.32
In the other skilled occupations and handicrafts, most of which had been well developed before 1845 and did not expand thereafter, the Irish were, in the main, unimportant. They numbered only twenty-eight of the total of 450 employees in the maritime industries, and made no headway in furniture building or cabinet making, where highly trained workmen were needed. Nor did they progress very far in the crafts dealing with precious metals or with the manufacture of musical in- struments.33 Among the ordinary mechanics and machinists their proportion was smaller than any other group's, and relatively few became transport workers, truckmen, coachmen, ~ LY or even sailors.34
They were more poorly represented in the commercial occu- pations than in the handicrafts. Though many fancied the dignity and independence of the traders' status, few attained it. Among the Irish immigrants were some shopkeepers and
emigrants from Canada and New Brunswick, coming as a result of the decline of the lumber industry there, were accustomed to working with wood and therefore made better carpenters (cf. Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Assembly Appointed to Inquire into the Causes . .. of the Emigra- tion ... from Lower Canada to the United States . . . [Montreal, 1849], 6, II; Marcus Lee Hansen, Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples . . [New Haven, 1940], 121).
32 Cf., e.g., Patrick Gargan (Conrad Reno, Memoirs of the Judiciary and the Bar of New England ... [Boston, 1900], I, 66) ; also infra, Table XIII.
33 For all these, cf. infra, Table XIII. There were a few exceptions, for which cf. Boston Pilot, June 19, 1858.
34 For coachmen, cf. infra, Table XIII. The seafaring community, though vital to Boston's prosperity, has not been more fully discussed because it was not an integral part of the city's population. Sailors on the Boston ships after the forties were no longer the New England boys who had formerly come down to wrest a career from the sea. Instead, Boston's merchant marine was manned by "an international proletariat of the sea." Transient foreigners of many races made up the crews of most ships that sailed out of Boston in these years, with only a slight addition of natives (Samuel Eliot Morison, Maritime History of Massachusetts ... [Boston, 1921], 353, 354; Boston Board of Trade, Report . . . and a Memorial to Congress on the Subject of Seamen and Marine Disasters [Boston, 1855], 5; infra, Table XIII). The only group permanently domiciled in the city that went to sea were the Negroes (cf. infra, 75).
70
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
merchants who had followed their customers to the New World. A handful of others had accumulated a modicum of capital and longed to join the large and prosperous group of retail dis- tributors of all sorts who supplied the necessities of life to Boston and its hinterland. In most branches of retailing, how- ever, they competed directly against the superior skill and re- sources of other groups and were doomed to failure from the start.35
In some spheres immigrants had an advantage over their native competitors. Where they relied on the patronage of their compatriots they prospered. Food dealers - butchers, fruit- erers, and, above all, grocers - dealt directly and intimately with immigrant women who preferred to purchase from those who spoke their own language, carried familiar foodstuffs, and served them as a friend, confidant, and adviser. Each national group, therefore, supported a comparatively large number of grocers and food dealers. With the exception of the Irish and Negroes, newcomers did not suffer by comparison with the native whites.36 Among the Irish, as among the Negroes, de- ficiencies of capital and skill weighed more heavily in the bal- ance, and their percentage of such retailers was lower than in any other group.37
For the humble immigrant the easiest ingress to commerce was through its least elegant form, peddling. Peddlers needed no permanent place of business. They required only a small capital investment and but passing acquaintance with trading methods. With their stock upon their backs they could move among their countrymen, deal with them on terms of confident familiarity, and earn a respectable livelihood. These induce-
35 Cf. the "dry goods dealers" and "other retailers," infra, Table XIII. The Irish dry goods and clothing stores catered chiefly to their own group (for immi- grant stores cf. references to Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel [Boston], Boston Pilot, and Gazette Française in Dissertation Copy, 129).
36 In all, food dealers came to between 3 and 4 per cent of the total working population, cf. infra, Table XIII.
37 The Irish had only about 1 per cent (idem) though there were some prom- inent grocers among them (cf. references to the Boston Pilot cited in Dissertation Copy, 130, n. 53) .
71
THE ECONOMIC ADJUSTMENT
ments were attractive enough to draw approximately 2 per cent of the Irish, and even larger contingents from other groups into itinerant trading.38
In other forms of minor retailing involving close personal contacts, each nativity group created a demand for the serv- ices of its own members. Inevitably, a circle of saloons, restau- rants, boarding houses, and a few hotels catered to foreigners. Germans would never think of residing or dining where they might have difficulty in securing their lager. It comforted the Irish to hear the old country brogue and feel the security of being with their own kind. Like the McGinnis in Mrs. Dorsey's ~ novel, most immigrants added to their income by keeping a few lodgers of their own nationality.39 To meet the needs of the unmarried, of sailors, and of those who had either not yet settled down in the city or were on their way west, every group - particularly the Irish and Germans - provided a large num- ber of boarding houses.4º There were also German lunchrooms, restaurants, and lager-bier saloons, Irish bars and dance halls, and even some English coffee houses. From these enterprises many foreign-born saloonkeepers and bartenders earned their living.41
The abundance of boarding houses and saloons was encour- aged by, and in turn caused, a paucity of hotels. Hotelkeeping was a substantial business managed and owned by Americans, and none of the foreign establishments in Boston ever gained as high a reputation as the Revere or Tremont House. There were, no doubt, a few Frenchmen and Italians who became prominent as purveyors of food in the genteel tradition of Continental cookery. Although a place always remained for
38 Cf. infra, Table XIII.
Anna H. Dorsey, "Nora Brady's Vow," Boston Pilot, February 21, 1857.
40 For Irish boarding houses, cf. references to United States Catholic Intelli- gencer, Jesuit or Catholic Sentinel, and Boston Pilot cited Dissertation Copy, 131; for German boarding houses, cf. references to Der Pionier, Boston Merkur, Bostoner Zeitung, and Neu England Demokrat cited Dissertation Copy, 132.
41 Cf. infra, Table XIII; also references to Der Pionier, Bostoner Zeitung, Neu England Demokrat, Boston Pilot, and Old Countryman ... (Boston), cited Dissertation Copy, 132.
72
BOSTON'S IMMIGRANTS, 1790-1865
the puddings and bombes of the confiseurs, even the high es- teem in which that tradition was held and memories of the great Julien did not sustain Nicholas Ouvre, Gallieni, and the other pensionaires and restaurateurs very long.42 Only those supported by an adequate foreign clientele survived. By the forties the French and Italian places declined visibly. In 1846 Antoine Vigne gave up the Perkins House, a "tremendous establishment" in Pearl Street, and moved to New York where he opened the Hotel de Paris on Broadway.43 No Irish hotel existed in the city until Henry Dooley, a jovial host from the British American Provinces, took over the Merchants Exchange on State Street.44 Prospering from the favor of the Irish societies which met there, it remained the only important for- eign public house in the city.45
If the Irish progressed only slowly in the handicraft and retail trades, they made no impression at all on the financial occupations central to the city's commercial life. Merchants and bankers constituted the keystone of Boston's prosperity. Linked with them were the salesmen and agents, and at a yet lower level, the store clerks and bookkeepers, indispensable cogs in the functioning of the business machine. These classes, despite the differences among them, were all high in respect- ability and economic position. Theirs was the most favored place in Boston life. The foreigners such as the Frenchman, P. P. F. Degrand, and the Spanish Jew, Abraham Touro, who entered into these ranks, were conspicuous chiefly for their singularity.46
Generally, the only opportunity for aliens to figure in com-
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