USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Lawrence > Immigrant city: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 > Part 3
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10. Lawrence American, Feb. 1, 1862, Dec. 3, 1864, Dec. 15, 1865; The Essex Eagle, Dec. 27, 1873; Franklin Library Association, The Act of Incorpora- tion ... (Lawrence, 1847); The Evening Tribune, Centennial Edition, 1953; The Lawrence Courier, July 17, 1847; The Lawrence Sentinel, Dec. 10, 1864; Francis V. Lloyd, Jr., "Melville's First Lectures," American Literature, XIII, No. 4 (Jan., 1942), 391-94; Municipal Records and Memoranda 1856-1859, II.
11. The Lawrence Courier, Nov. 11, Dec. 5, 1846, Jan. 6, Feb. 13, 27, Feb. Extra, Mar. 20, April 3, July 31, Aug. 7, 1847; Maurice Dorgan, History of Lawrence, Mass., with War Records (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), pp. 44, 174; United States Census Office, Ninth Census of the United States 1870, I (Washington, 1872), 380-81.
25
MODEL TOWN, 1845-1850
Map II STREETS AND IMMIGRANT CENTERS IN LAWRENCE
LAWRENCE, MASS.
.....
To Methuen Center
Pleasant Valley
Ha
Road
Prospect Hill
Tower Hill
1000000930 000
Comm
Old County Road
District
Mill
River
District
Merrimack
Shanty District 1860
Old Essex TurnpikeCOC"
112
River
Shaw sheen
To Andover Square
Central District
STREETS
I. Canal
7. Haverhill
2. Methuen
8. Oak
xxxxxxx
Half Blocks Studied in Ch. V
3. Essex
9. Elm
D Dam
4. Common 10. Park
A St. Anne's
5. Valley
11. Prospect
M St. Mary's
6. Lowell
12. Broadway
13. Water
French Canadian Centers c. 1910
0
2000
26
IMMIGRANT CITY
The model town had great respect for these American working- men and never treated them with the scorn later shown in 1912. "The majority of the female operatives," said one observer, "were good, wholesome farmers' daughters, often working to clear their fathers' farms or to send their brothers through college." "The Iron Workmen of this country," said the Courier, "stand much higher than any other class of laboring men. ... We have seldom found a man more truly independent, OPENHEARTED and MANLY than these workmen. . . . It is the laboring class .. . who are ultimately to prove the destruction or the salvation of our coun- try .... Let the industrious working man, whether he be mechanic or farmer, whether he reside in . . . Lawrence . . . [or] Vermont .. . understand his own importance." Such statements were typical of the mid-nineteenth-century appreciation of factory "mechanics."12
But the admiration for native-born "mechanics" did not apply to the "menial" Irish "laborers" who had flocked to Lawrence to escape the horrors of the Irish potato famine of 1846. Sneering references to the intemperate Irish appeared at an early date. The Courier, furthermore, refused to believe that four hundred natives were living with the Irish in the shanty district near the dam. Segre- gation was practiced at the very beginning as the natives took the best parts of town. As more and more Irish came, the native-born moved to Prospect and Tower Hills and South Lawrence, all on the outskirts of Lawrence. Both physically and socially the Irish and natives were miles apart in the model town.13
Between 1845 and 1850 and for a few years thereafter Law- rence was a model town. Conceived, built, and directed by Boston Brahmins, it was designed to produce cottons and woolens, but to do it in an environment that was physically and morally sound. To Lawrence would come sturdy mechanics to do the city's work and be uplifted in the process. This was the way the founders looked on Lawrence. As more and more immigrants came, however, the model town soon changed to an immigrant city.
12. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, "Fall River, Lowell, and Lawrence," Thirteenth Annual Report . . 1882, Mass. Pub. Doc. 15, p. 380; The Lawrence Courier, May 8, 1847.
13. Ibid., Feb. Extra, 1847. See Tables I and V.
CHAPTER III
The Shanty Irish, 1850-1865
The Irish potato famine coincided with the founding of Law- rence: a simple fact that was to shape for all time the history of the city. Gaunt and wasted by the famine, Irish families from southern counties such as Cork sold their furniture and made their way to Dublin or Liverpool, England, in the late 1840's and early 1850's. There recently emptied ships from Canada and the United States lay waiting to load emigrants for the return trip. For many the sea was a final resting place, for filth, over-crowding, and inadequate food and water made the voyage to America long and menacing. Massed on the decks, the survivors looked hopefully on the new world as the ship entered Quebec or Boston. Those landing at Quebec found new horrors as unemployment drove them to the long foot journey down through Canada to New England. After months of agony Irish men, women, and children trickled into the mill cities of the Merrimack Valley, one of them Lawrence. The Boston arrivals found the walk or train ride to Lawrence relatively simple. The Irish moved into the city so rapidly that by 1875 there were over 8,000. Though the total was never again this high, it was greater than that of any other foreign-born group until 1900. Once in the city the Irish flocked to Wards Two and Three, which were soon the most densely popu- lated areas. South of the Common they lived in the mill boarding houses and to the north they settled on the "plains." Many also inhabited a shanty village along the river near the dam.1
1. Irish-born in Lawrence-1865: 6047; 1875: 8232; 1885: 7643; 1895: 7487; 1905: 6557. Oliver Warner, Abstract of the Census of Massachusetts,- 1865 ... (Boston, 1867), p. 63; Carroll D. Wright, Census of Massachusetts- 1875, I (Boston, 1876), 291; Carroll D. Wright, Census of Massachusetts: 1885
28
IMMIGRANT CITY
As early as 1846 a priest held services, and after a few years of temporary meeting places, the Irish built the Immaculate Con- ception Church in 1853 and Saint Mary's between 1866 and 1871. The Irish Benevolent Society and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, both founded in 1863, were their first official clubs, but the Irish held meetings from the very moment they arrived. In 1853, for example, the Irish patriot T. F. Meagher, who had escaped from exile to Tasmania, lectured to them about the evils of British rule in the old country. Out of such meetings came the first Irish political leader, O'Hea Cantillon. But the first Irishman to capture the respect of the natives was William O'Sullivan, who became the captain of an Irish regiment in the Civil War and died for his new country.2
The wooden huts above the dam were responsible for the label "shanty" Irish. These were shacks of slabs and unfinished lumber with over-lapping boards for the roofs. Above each roof rose a stovepipe chimney and piled high around the walls was sod for insulation. Strangely like the sod houses of the western plains later in the century, these "underground mud huts of the 'city of Cork'" did not vanish until 1898. Other Irish pushed out onto the "plains" above Haverhill Street, where they built more wooden shanties. A Lawrence American reporter described what he saw there during a Democratic torchlight procession: ". .. in various localities a lone, solitary candle was observable in some attic
I, Part 1 (Boston, 1887), 507; Horace G. Wadlin, Census of ... Massachusetts: 1895, II (Boston, 1897), 607; Chief of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Census of ... Massachusetts 1905, I (Boston, 1909), 109, 1xxvii. See Table III. Alice W. O'Connor, "A Study of the Immigration Problem in Lawrence, Massachusetts" (unpublished social workers' thesis, Lawrence, Mass., 1914), p. 10. An anal- ysis of twenty Irish priests and politicians showed that most were from southern Ireland. The Lawrence Sentinel, Aug. 28, 1869, Feb. 26, 1870, Jan. 6, April 6, 1872, Jan. 3, 1874; The Essex Eagle, Jan. 2, May 29, 1875; Lawrence Journal, Jan. 5, 12, Dec. 7, 1878, Dec. 31, 1881, Feb. 16, 1884; Lawrence American, Jan. 11, 1884; The Evening Tribune, Jan. 16, 1892; Marcus Lee Han- sen, The Immigrant in American History (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), pp. 158-60; The Lawrence Courier, Sept. 28, 1855; United States Census Bureau, Thirteenth Census of the United States . .. 1910: Abstract of the Census ... with Supple- ment for Massachusetts ... (Washington, 1913), p. 609. See map, p. 25, for streets and immigrant centers.
2. The Lawrence Sentinel, April 4, 1868; Lawrence American, Aug. 24, 1866; Katherine O'Keefe, A Sketch of Catholicity in Lawrence and Vicinity (Lawrence, 1882), p. 61; The Lawrence Courier, Mar. 4, 1848, Feb. 24, 1849, Nov. 25, 1853; The Lawrence Sentinel, May 11, Aug. 3, Dec. 14, 1861, Nov. 14, 1863.
29
THE SHANTY IRISH, 1850-1865
window, with sometimes a half dozen in a cellar window, set in holes dug in potatoes, showing dimly through smoky glass . . . total depravity. .. . " The huts often burned, and the destruction of a large one near the reservoir in 1875 laid bare their shabbiness. In this shack, measuring a hundred feet by twenty and divided in the middle, lived a family, seventy-seven boarders, and two girl cooks. The fire started at 1:30 A.M. in a cubicle usually occupied by the two cooks but empty at the moment because they were sleeping on the floor of the main room to escape bed bugs.3
When the Massachusetts Sanitary Commission investigated Lawrence in 1850, it warned that the poor housing, particularly the "habitations, habits, and peculiar modes of living of the Irish laborers," menaced the health of all. The commission also feared the "unwholesome exhalations" and exposure that threatened those digging the canal.4 Whatever the reason, it was a fortunate Irish immigrant who did not fall prey to disease. Lawrence suffered the most serious typhoid fever epidemic in the state's history in the winter of 1850 and almost half of the deaths in the town before 1850 were from either typhoid fever or consumption. It was no better in the next decade and a half as Lawrence ranked fourth in the state in death rate and averaged over twenty-nine deaths an- nually per thousand population.5
Water and food were partly to blame. The Merrimack was full of sewage brought down from Lowell, and the outhouses pol- luted the wells. Poverty meant poor food for most and starvation for some. As always there were exceptions. A grocer's ledger revealed that Michael Carney, an Irish laborer with a wife and at
3. The first quotation is from the Lawrence American, Nov. 15, 1856, in- cluded in Municipal Records and Memoranda 1856-1859, I; Robert E. Todd and Frank B. Sanborn, The Report of the Lawrence Survey (Lawrence, 1912), p. 32. The second quotation is from Municipal Records, I. The Essex Eagle, July 17, 24, 1875; Lawrence American, Mar. 4, 1864.
4. [Lemuel Shattuck], Sanitary Survey of the Town of Lawrence (Boston, 1850), pp. 9-10, 20-21.
5. Report ... relating to the Registry and Return of Births, Marriages, and Deaths ... , XIV (1855), Mass. Pub. Doc. 1, p. 45; XVII (1858), 66; XIX (1860) xlvi; XXIV (1865), cxxvii; XXV (1866), cxix. From 1847 to 1849, 41 per cent of all deaths and over 50 per cent of Irish deaths were caused by typhoid fever and consumption. Essex Institute, Vital Records of Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (Salem, Mass., 1926). The exact death rate averaged 29.4 per thousand population for the years 1855, 1860, and 1865.
30
IMMIGRANT CITY
least two children, purchased the following during a four-month period:
Potatoes-six pecks
Rice and meal-eight pounds
Flour-three barrels and 54 pounds Beef-15 pounds
Pork-6 pounds
Fish-41 pounds
Eggs-53
Crackers-one barrel
Cheese and butter-80 pounds
Molasses-nine gallons
Sugar-62 pounds
Oil-5 pounds
Tea and coffee-17 pounds Vinegar-four pints
A censensus of six boarding-house menus showed equally heavy food:
Breakfast-Hot biscuit, butter, meat, bread, pie, doughnuts, tea
Dinner-Meat, potatoes, pudding, bread, butter, tea, vegetables Supper-Bread, butter, tea, cold meat, sauce, cake
But Carney may have taken in boarders, and boarding-house keep- ers always exaggerated the amount of food they offered. Most Lawrence workers ate poorly.6
In spite of the unfavorable conditions the Irish went about their work building the towering dam, the mile-long canal, and the giant factories. By 1849 the Bay State Mills and Atlantic Mills were in production; three years later the Pacific joined them, making three million-dollar corporations in the city. Bay State shawls, Atlantic sheets and shirts, and Pacific cashmeres soon became household names throughout the United States. Altogether Irish and Yankee muscle built six cotton mills and five woolen mills by 1855, enough to give the city 10 per cent of the cotton spindles and 15 per cent of the sets of woolen machinery in Massa- chusetts. The model town had already become a prominent textile city.7
6. William D. Joplin, Ledger, 1847, MS at the Essex Institute, Salem, Mass., pp. 89-90, 139-40; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Sixth Annual Report . . . 1875, Mass. Pub. Doc. 31, pp. 419-20.
7. A. W. Doe, Statistics of Lawrence (Mass.) Manufactures. January . . . 1861 (Manchester, N.H., 1861); William Filmer, The Directory of the Town of Lawrence (Lawrence, 1848); John A. Goodwin, The Lawrence Directory (Lawrence, 1853); George Adams, The Lawrence Directory (Lawrence, 1857);
31
THE SHANTY IRISH, 1850-1865
The mills were not an unmixed blessing to the Irish. Al- though wages were supposedly $.25 to $.50 a week higher than anywhere else, they were low; certainly less than $1.00 a day. Working hours were long. In spite of mass protests reformers failed to get either a ten-hour day or a full hour off at noon. Irishmen leaving their shanties on the "plains" at six in the morning were lucky if they arrived home a dozen hours later. And they were fortunate also if they avoided injury. The Courier faithfully recorded the steady series of mutilations and deaths occurring in the mills,8 but it remained for the Pemberton disaster to demon- strate the dangers of mill work.
The Pemberton Mill, five stories high with solid six-inch oak floors, wide windows, and handsome exterior, was the model mill in the model city. Here seven hundred workers eagerly awaited the close of a cold winter's day on January 10, 1860. A foreman pulled out his large key-winding watch, which read 4:45 P.M. A young girl leaned from an upstairs window of the Duck Mill and spoke to her lover in the Pemberton. Doctor Lamb looked out of his window in an office building close by. And then it happened. The pillars supporting the center of the building at the south end of the top floor began to buckle, bringing down the walls and roof. As the heavy flooring gave way, it fell through to the floor below setting off a rhythmical movement that ran through the factory from south to north bringing it to the ground within sixty seconds. The foreman never looked at his watch again. The girl in the Duck Mill screamed as she saw her sweetheart fall from the window to his death below. Doctor Lamb witnessed the entire collapse and then ran to bring aid to those still living. John Tatterson had just
C. A. Dockham, A Directory of the City of Lawrence (Lawrence, 1860); Horace Wadsworth, History of Lawrence, Mass., with Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Ex-Mayors up to 1880 .. . (Lawrence, 1879), p. 93; Maurice Dorgan, History of Lawrence, Mass., with War Records (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), pp. 42-43; Francis DeWitt, Statistical Information Relating to . . . In- dustry in Massachusetts . .. 1855 (Boston, 1856). Lawrence was incorporated as a city in 1853. Dorgan, History, p. 45.
8. The Lawrence Courier, Jan. 16, 1847, Jan. 15, 1848, Aug. 4, 1849, Sept. 6, 1851, Aug. 20, 1852. The average monthly pay of male laborers in Massachusetts in 1850 was $22.92 per month or $.88 a day. Laborers in Lawrence earned $.84 to $1.00 a day. The Lawrence Courier, April 10, 1855; Dorgan, History, p. 39. The noon hour was only forty-five minutes and workers found it difficult to get home to the "plains" and back in that time. The Lawrence Courier, April 27, 1857.
32
IMMIGRANT CITY
entered the north end of the building when he felt the start of its destruction. With great presence of mind he darted to a corner and calmly rode down with the floor to the ground. While most of the employees rode safely with him, dozens were killed and hundreds injured. Many more were trapped in the ruins and the entire city set about rescuing them. The biting cold of the January night, the flickering light of the huge bonfire built to light the work, the smell of oil and death, and the sounds of the crushed and dying brought intense terror to all. The pale faces of those staggering from the remains added to the horror. And then at eleven o'clock one of the rescuers happened to drive a pick through a lantern, dashing its flame onto the inflammable cotton and oily waste. Now the moans of pain became screams of panic as the fire raced through the ruins destroying those who were still caught. An overseer, Maurice Palmer, slashed his throat as the flames approached, but happily was rescued still alive and survived.
In the weeks that followed, thousands of dollars flowed into the city as the entire nation learned of the tragedy. Eighty-eight had died; 116 had been seriously injured, many maimed for life; 159 had received minor wounds; 307 had escaped with only memories. The country watched with interest as the jury met to fix the blame, for future mill construction would hinge on its findings. The too wide windows and the too heavy floors had made the rows of iron pillars running the length of the building on each floor the key to the structure. The jury found that these pillars on the top floor were defective. When they buckled, they had brought the entire mill down. The jury discovered also that several of the pillars had collapsed in 1854 causing one floor to settle, but no one then had heeded the warning.9
Poor homes, disease, and death were only some of the problems faced by the early Irish in Lawrence; ill will between them and the natives also contributed to their insecurity. An early example was the "Black House" riot in April, 1847, which started when Maria Sullivan, an Irish prostitute, spread the rumor that she had
9. J. F. C. Hayes, History of the City of Lawrence, Mass. (Lawrence, 1868), pp. 99-127; The Lawrence Courier, Jan. 14, 21, 28, 1860; An Authentic History of the Lawrence Calamity . .. (Boston, 1860); The Evening Tribune, Cen- tennial Edition, 1953; The Lawrence Courier, Sept. 26, 1854; Donald B. Cole, "The Collapse of the Pemberton Mill," Essex Institute Historical Collections (January, 1960), pp. 47-55.
33
THE SHANTY IRISH, 1850-1865
seen a man murdered and thrown into the river. When the very man appeared a few days later, an anti-Irish crowd gathered and ruined the brothel, popularly known as the "Black House," where she lived.10
Religious antagonism between the native Protestants and the Irish Catholics gave the impetus to the nativist movement. While the native Courier carried articles both for and against Catholics, its tone was always offensively patronizing. When Cantillon stated that a temperance oath was meaningless unless given before a priest, a letter to the Courier attacked him and accused all Catholics of being clannish. Later the Courier itself assailed the Catholics all over the country who would not join in the acclaim for Louis Kossuth, the Protestant Hungarian patriot, who visited America in 1851. Half of the people attending church in Lawrence were Catholics, a percentage that the natives considered ominous.11
Social distinctions also separated the Irish from the native-born. Since most of the Irish children worked in the mills, only six of them regularly attended school. Many of their parents were also illiterates. While at first the Courier tried to be fair about Irish drunkenness, by 1848 it was warning the immigrants about in- temperance. At the same time the Courier was blaming an increase in crime on what it called the "most vicious population of Europe." Crime and disorder did seem to occur most frequently in such im- migrant areas as Common Street and the "plains," where prostitu- tion and gambling prevailed. The Irish attacked the police, brawled on Sunday, and defaced trees. The resulting court lists seemed entirely Irish. While the Irish nature was hardly as vicious as the newspapers portrayed it, a mixture of religious and social distinctions made the immigrants a group apart.12
But such differences did not cause an organized nativist move- ment until the Irish began to compete politically and economically with the native-born. Before 1850 the number of Irish voters was negligible, but by 1852 the vote was large enough to attract both parties. The Democrats, for example, tried to show that the Whig administration was doing nothing to help a group of Irishmen exiled from their homeland. They then nominated O'Hea Cantillon for
10. The Lawrence Courier, May 1, 1847.
11. Ibid., Mar. 4, 1848, Sept. 8, 1849, Dec. 6, 13, 27, 1851, Feb. 4, 1858.
12. Ibid., Nov. 21, 1846, July 31, Aug. 7, 12, 1847, Mar. 4, Oct. 7, 1848, Dec. 24, 1852, Jan. 15, April 24, 27, July 31, 1855.
34
IMMIGRANT CITY
the state House of Representatives, but enough natives scratched his name from the ballot to defeat him. When the Democrats won the city election of 1852, the Whigs blamed it on the Irish vote. The native Whigs were then ready to join a nativist party.13
The local depression of 1854 and 1855 transformed the anti- Irish resentment into a political movement. At first there were plenty of jobs in Lawrence, but as soon as the dam was completed in 1848, the Courier warned the Irish that they would have a hard time finding any more work in the town. Even with the mill con- struction, the competition for jobs was so fierce that the Courier in 1850 was urging the Irish to move on west. By 1851 the Courier attributed unemployment to low tariffs and dependence on southern cotton. After good times in 1852 and 1853 the de- pression returned in 1854 and caused mass unemployment at the Bay State Mill in 1855.14
It was little wonder that the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party rose rapidly in Lawrence in 1854. More surprising was the extent of the political revolution in the city and in the state. Lawrence lay in the Whig stronghold of Essex County, which was basically agrarian and conservative. In 1846, for ex- ample, the county cast over 6,000 ballots for the Whig candidate for governor and only 3,500 for the Democratic candidate. The model town of Lawrence conformed to the pattern. In the first three years, when Lawrence voted with Methuen, the Whigs carried the combined towns in each election, and even after Lawrence began to vote separately, the trend continued. Between 1850 and 1853 the Whigs got about half of the Lawrence vote, the Democrats 35 per cent, and the Free Soilers 15 per cent. At the state level the Democrats captured the governor's seat in 1850 and 1851 by uniting with the Free Soilers, but when this marriage ended, the Whigs won in 1852 and 1853.15
The Courier first referred to the Know-Nothings in May of 1853, when it argued that both a native American party and the immigrants were a threat to American institutions. Two months
13. Ibid., Mar. 6, 1847, Feb. 7, Oct. 22, 1852, April 12, Nov. 25, Dec. 9, 1853. 14. Ibid., April 8, 1848, June 1, Aug. 31, 1850, Jan. 11, Sept. 27, 1851, Jan. 3, 1852, Jan. 1, 8, 1855.
15. Ibid., Nov. 14, 1846, Nov. 13, 1847, Nov. 18, 1848, Nov. 17, 1849, Nov. 16, 1850, Nov. 15, 1851, Nov. 9, 1852, Nov. 16, 1853.
35
THE SHANTY IRISH, 1850-1865
later it denounced both President Pierce's appointment of foreigners to office and the rising menace of Know-Nothingism. Socially anti-Irish, the Courier, nonetheless, feared the political impact of a nativist party. When the Know-Nothing party first appeared in Lawrence, in the spring of 1854, its secrecy and ritual attracted many supporters. The first gatherings took place in a "wigwam" near the railroad bridge between Valley and Common Streets in the heart of the city.16 1300519
The summer of 1854 removed the secrecy from the Know- Nothing party and widened the Irish-native split. The case of Bridget Hogan, who came to Lawrence from Ireland in the late 1840's with her mother and two sisters, showed how intense the struggle had become. After her mother's death, Bridget went to live with the Bensons, a wealthy Protestant family, where she abandoned Catholicism. One Sunday in June her sisters met her on the way to church and tried to force her into the Catholic Church. Failing that, they went to court to bring her back home. When Mrs. Benson succeeded in keeping the girl, a fight nearly broke out then between the Irish and the Yankees.17
The tension reached the breaking point on the hot summer afternoon of July 1, 1854. Who started the riot is not certain. Some one, either a Nova Scotian derelict who had been promised a quart of rum by an Irishman or a Know-Nothing out to start trouble, raised an American flag upside down with a cross above it on the "plains." When the police removed the flag and cross unopposed, the affair might have ended, but the hot summer night brought a crowd of natives out on the streets of the "plains." Soon they formed a parade behind the Lawrence Brass Band and marched two thousand strong down to another Irish center on Common Street. The nativist Courier later called it an orderly group of "mechanics, traders, and business men"; while the opposi- tion Sentinel said it consisted of bums and boys seeking trouble. The marchers waved banners, shouted defiance, and filled their pockets with stones. When they reached the home of an unpopular Irishman, they stopped and began to throw their stones, badly damaging his house. Whether the natives started it or whether
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