by H. W. Brands
As bad luck would have it, the onset of the potato blight in Ireland coincided with the triumph of free trade in Britain, Ireland’s colonial master. London’s free-traders, having devoted decades to making the principles of Adam Smith the law of the British empire, refused to jeopardize their capitalist experiment in order to save the Irish. Even as hundreds of thousands of peasants died of malnutrition, Irish landlords exported agricultural commodities by the boatload.1
Of those Irish who didn’t die, some million and a half made their way to America. The newcomers weren’t the poorest of the Irish poor, who, lacking the means or vision to emigrate, simply starved in place; but neither were they the entrepreneurs who had characterized the earlier emigration. They came with scant skills and scanter capital; though nearly all had been farmers, most stuck in the cities. Even after the Homestead Act made land available, few emigrated to the frontier, partly because they lacked the cash for travel, tools, and filing fees but also because American farm culture, with its solitary farm houses planted in the middle of large fields, sometimes miles from the nearest neighbors, contradicted the communal style and values of Ireland’s peasant villages. Irish laborers built the Union Pacific and other railroads; Irish mine workers dug coal from the hills of Pennsylvania. But for most of the rest, the cities of the eastern seaboard became their home.
They took employment where they found it. They dug basements and ditches, drove piles and wagons, loaded railcars and barges. On the eve of the Civil War more than 80 percent of New York City’s unskilled labor was Irish. Their employers appreciated their willingness to work for low wages—even as many of those employers despised the Irish as barely human. George Templeton Strong was building a house in New York and needed help. “Hibernia came to the rescue yesterday morning,” he noted in his diary. “Twenty ‘sons of toil’ with prehensile paws supplied them by nature with evident preference to the handling of the spade and the wielding of the pickaxe and congenital hollows on the shoulder wonderfully adapted to make the carrying of the hod a luxury instead of a labor commenced the task yesterday morning.” The Irish were loved even less by the workers they displaced, in particular African Americans. “Along the wharves where the colored man once done the whole business of shipping and unshipping, in stores where his services were once rendered, and in families where the chief places were filled by him, in all these situations there are substituted foreigners,” a black newspaper complained. Frederick Douglass observed, “Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly arrived emigrant from the emerald isle, whose hunger and color entitle him to special favor.” Yet Douglass himself realized that such preference as the Irish obtained didn’t amount to much. “In assuming our avocation,” he remarked, the Irish “also assumed our degradation.”2
The competition at the bottom of the social and economic ladder burst shockingly into the open in the summer of 1863. Even as the Union army held fast at Gettysburg, the war came home to Manhattan. The new conscription law compelled young men to register for the draft; those who lacked the three hundred dollars for a replacement were subject to a lottery that determined which ones would actually serve. Many Irish asked why they should fight to free the slaves, whom they would then have to fight for jobs. They observed acidly that three hundred dollars would buy an Irishman’s life while a typical slave cost a thousand dollars. They wondered why blacks long resident in America should be exempt from the draft when the Irish were snatched straight off the boat. Many Irish took to the streets in protest of the draft, of the rich man’s exemption, and of assorted other insults that grew more onerous in the stifling heat of the urban July. Protesters hurled rocks at targets identified with the Republican party, starting with shops and houses and escalating to persons, in particular African Americans. One band of rioters attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum, shouting “Burn the niggers’ nest!” Patrick Merry, an Irish laborer, led another band down Broadway to a neighborhood inhabited by blacks, where the rioters spread out and began chasing those they found on the street. Blacks were dragged from streetcars and beaten. One black man was lynched and his body burned.
For three days the rioting raged. Blacks weren’t merely victims of the violence; as they organized to defend themselves and their property they inflicted casualties on their attackers. The opposing sides armed and fired, till the riot looked alarmingly like urban warfare. Only the arrival of federal troops, drawn in haste from the Pennsylvania front, restored order. By then more than a hundred persons had died, leaving blacks bitter, Irish aggrieved, and everyone wondering what would happen next.
The draft riots revealed a rift not simply between Irish and blacks but among the Irish themselves. Pre-famine immigrants had begun to assimilate into the larger community; these “lace curtain Irish” took pride in pointing to the hundred thousand sons of Erin who fought on the side of the Union. But the arrival of the famine refugees—poorer, more ignorant, less accustomed to city life—threatened much of what their predecessors had attained. These “shanty Irish” rekindled the anti-Catholicism that forever lay close to the surface of American life, contributing, in the 1850s, to the surprising success of the nativist Know Nothing party. By then several good potato crops had reduced the pressure to leave Ireland, after which the Civil War—and the prospect of being drafted—diminished the attractive power of the United States. But as the war ended the immigration resumed. The structural changes in the Irish economy continued, and if Irish peasants weren’t dying as fast as before, neither were they thriving. Modern Irish agriculture—like modern agriculture everywhere—required fewer and fewer farmers, and with little industry in Ireland, the displaced farmers had nowhere to go but abroad.
The same was true of their daughters, who formed a growing part of the Irish emigrant stream. In the post-famine years, in fact, women and girls outnumbered men and boys among those crossing the ocean to America. The female majority—quite unusual among immigrants—reflected at once the dismal prospects for women in Ireland and the comparatively bright outlook in America. Irish marriages traditionally required a dowry; with dowries harder to accumulate, marriages came later and later. For an increasing number of Irish women, marriage didn’t come at all. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, a quarter of Irish women never married. In Irish society there were worse fates for a woman, but not many.
Those Irish women who went to America fared better. Traveling alone, they took jobs in the growing number of American households that could afford maids, in the hope of bringing brothers and mothers and fathers over after them. An Irishman—a priest, as it happened—who visited America after the Civil War described the arrangement:
To better the circumstances of her family, the young Irish girl leaves her home for America. There she goes into service or engages in some kind of feminine employment. The object she has in view—the same for which she left her home and ventured to a strange country—protects her from all danger, especially to her character: that object, her dream by day and night, is the welfare of her family, whom she is determined, if possible, to again have with her as of old. From the first moment, she saves every cent she earns—that is, every cent she can spare from what is absolutely necessary to her decent appearance.… To keep her place or retain her employment, what will she not endure?—sneers at her nationality, mockery of her peculiarities, even ridicule of her faith, though the hot blood flushes her cheek with fierce indignation. At every hazard the place must be kept, the money earned, the deposit in savings-bank increased; and though many a night is passed in tears and prayers, her face is calm, and her eye bright, and her voice cheerful. One by one, the brave girl brings the members of her family about her.3
“Bridget”—as the Irish maids were stereotypically called—had to be brave. Her employers knew how much her wages mattered to her and her family, and they knew how a hint of dissatisfaction from one employer might make her unemployable forever. Under the best of circumstances it left her in no position to complai
n of long hours—from before dawn till long after dusk, in most cases—and meager pay. Under worse conditions it left her vulnerable to sexual predation, better off than female slaves in the antebellum South but not always by much. (The bitter antidraft observation about an Irish life being worth less than that of a slave was rooted in economic reality. Before the war a Southern planter told a visitor he had hired some Irishmen to drain a swamp for him. “It’s dangerous work, and a negro’s life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it’s a considerable loss, you know.”)
Some Irish women preferred work in factories to domestic service. “It’s the freedom that we want when the day’s work is done,” said a woman who worked in a paper-box plant. “I know some nice girls … that make more money and dress better and everything for being in service.… But they’re never sure of one minute that’s their own when they’re in the house. Our day is ten hours long, but when it’s done it’s done, and we can do what we like with the evenings. That’s what I’ve heard from every nice girl that ever tried service. You’re never sure that your soul’s your own except when you are out of the house.… I couldn’t stand that a day.”4
Where to work was an important question, often the most pressing for immigrants. But another, deeper question for the Irish was how Irish to be. Because they arrived speaking English and sharing skin color with the dominant segments of American society, even first-generation Irish immigrants could consider assimilating. This course had obvious appeal: escape from the specific insults and undifferentiated prejudice visited upon the unassimilated, opportunity to climb the social and economic ladder.
Yet as the number of Irish continued to grow, an alternative strategy, of embracing Irishness, became increasingly viable. By 1870 the Irish composed more than a fifth of the populations of New York and Boston. In both cities they were the single largest identifiable group. If the Irish stuck together they could wield considerable power. If Irish employers hired Irish workers, and Irish customers patronized Irish merchants, the community would benefit economically; if Irish politicians catered to Irish voters, who returned the favor at the polls, the community would advance politically.5
In practice the Irish did a bit of both. Some of the better educated blended into the American mainstream; many of the poorer paraded their Irishness. The former were more successful as individuals; the latter exerted greater influence as a group. By the 1880s the Irish vote, to cite the most obvious manifestation of collective heft, could swing elections in New York City and State, in Boston and Massachusetts, and, in tight races, in the nation as a whole.
SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH century, Germans had composed the second-largest stream of immigration to America, after the English. They were eclipsed by the Irish during the potato famine and briefly after, but by the 1860s they again predominated—although until 1871 it could be hard to tell who was German and who wasn’t. To the haphazard extent immigrants were enumerated, they were tallied by country of origin, and before Bismarck brought most of the German-speaking peoples into a single empire, the Saxons and Bavarians and Hessians and Prussians sometimes confused the tallymen.
No such collective trauma as the Irish famine drove Germans west. The failed revolution of 1848 sent a wavelet of liberals into exile, but their numbers never approached their symbolic value to Americans who flattered themselves as providing a haven for freedom fighters. Crop failures contributed to decisions by German farmers to leave, but because Germany never fell into such dependence on a single crop as Ireland did, the Germans were less susceptible to blight or rust or wilt.
German immigrants fought in the Civil War, in greater numbers and with greater enthusiasm than the Irish. Forty-eighter Carl Schurz, who rose to the rank of general in the Union army, was the most conspicuous of the 175,000 Germans who battled the secessionists. Some observers gave Missouri’s Germans credit for saving that border state for the Union. Robert E. Lee himself had great respect for the Germans; the Confederate general was said to have declared, “Take the Dutch out of the Union army and we could whip the Yankees easily.” The Germans weren’t necessarily more devoted to abstract liberty than the Irish draft rioters; Henry Frank, a German living in Wisconsin, complained of the “miserable war” and declared, “I am no longer a friend of soldiers, and least of all do I wish to be shot to death for Lincoln and his Negroes.” Many of those who fought did so because they were drafted and couldn’t find substitutes; others simply backed a winner. (So did German investors who bought Jay Cooke’s war bonds. As Carl Schurz sardonically remarked of his capitalist former countrymen, “During the Civil War, America was a friend in need whom her friends across the Atlantic did not abandon—and Germany was rewarded in gold for its idealism and trust in America to the tune of seven percent interest.”)
In the immediate aftermath of the war, German farmers responded to the Homestead Act by emigrating in larger numbers than ever. Inheritance laws in the German states divided farms until they became uneconomic to operate, especially in the face of the increasing integration of world commodity markets. The existence of thriving German agricultural colonies in the American Midwest and in Texas drew new German immigrants to those districts, where they could expect to speak German, read German newspapers, attend German churches, and rear their children in German ways.
After about 1870 the German emigrant stream contained a growing number of displaced townsfolk. Industrialization destroyed the livelihoods of craftsmen, as did competition from immigrants to Germany from other countries. The consolidation of Bismarck’s empire induced East Europeans to migrate to Germany, where they undercut the wages of native Germans, causing many of them to leave. Bismarck, for one, saw this free market in labor as a good thing. “The volume of emigration is a most exact index of our growing well-being,” he declared. “The better it goes for us, the higher the volume of emigration.… There are two kinds of emigrants, … those who emigrate because they still have money enough … and those who emigrate because they now have money enough.”6
JACOB RIIS KNEW Bismarck from a distance and hated him, as did every Dane of Riis’s generation. The Iron Chancellor made Denmark a pawn in his imperial schemes, bullying the Danes and stealing their soil. Had Riis been a year or two older, he would have joined the army to fight the Germans. Instead he went to America.
His reasons for going were at once complicated and simple. His birthplace stuck in his memory as stubbornly as it stuck in the past.
To say that Ribe was an old town hardly describes it to readers at this day. A town might be old and yet have kept step with time. In my day Ribe had not. It had never changed its step or its ways since whale-oil lanterns first hung in iron chains across its cobblestone-paved streets to light them at night. There they hung yet, every rusty link squeaking dolefully in the wind that never ceased blowing from the sea. Coal-oil, just come from America, was regarded as a dangerous innovation. I remember buying a bottle of “Pennsylvania oil” at the grocer’s for eight skilling, as a doubtful domestic experiment. Steel pens had not crowded out the old-fashioned goose-quill, and pen-knives meant just what their name implies. Matches were yet of the future. We carried tinderboxes to strike fire with. People shook their heads at the telegraph. The day of the stage-coach was not yet past. Steamboat and railroad had not come within forty miles of the town.
Ribe’s one factory was a cotton mill employing half the town’s workforce. Its owner had seen the American Civil War coming, stockpiled cotton, and grown rich after Sumter. He and the town took fright in 1863 when the German army approached, and though the city was spared, the specter of Prussian militarism never receded much below popular consciousness.
Jacob Riis was the next to youngest of the fourteen children of a schoolteacher in Ribe, who employed Latin ordinals to keep them straight. The sixth son was christened Sextus, the ninth Nonus, and so on. “How I escaped Tertius I don’t know,” Riis remarked. His father wished all the children to pursue professional careers but lacked the means to get them
started. (The one who made it on his own, becoming a doctor, died just out of medical school.)
Young Jacob showed literary skills, which his father urged him to cultivate. But he also possessed a stubborn streak, and when school didn’t suit him he announced he would become a carpenter. His father resignedly apprenticed him out. Jacob’s master won a contract for work at the cotton mill, and the fifteen-year-old boy spent many days there.
On one of those days, crossing a bridge below the mill, he encountered the twelve-year-old daughter of the mill owner. He had known Elizabeth before, as a child in the town. But he saw her now with new eyes and was transfixed. “I fell head over heels in love,” he wrote. The love was impossible, he being a mere apprentice, she the daughter of the richest man in town. At the very least it must wait years. Yet he approached her, awkwardly. She rebuffed him with the cruel laugh of the favored child.
Heartbroken, he pondered running off to join the army, which was again fighting the Germans. But he was underage, and so contented himself with flight to Copenhagen, where he lost himself in the larger city. For four years he worked, mastering the carpenter trade. Finally he came of age as a craftsman, winning admission to the Copenhagen carpenters’ guild.
