Westward Cork Migration by Sail 1815-1860 by John Sutton

PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE

illegally naturalized the newly arrived Irish with the help of Democrat judges. The way politics was played here and in other cities was everything the Irish enjoyed: intimate, them- against-us tribal, and based on getting one’s own people – brothers-in-law, nephews, the children of friends – into some, any, public post. The law attracted many of the clever, since it required what many self-taught Irish could provide: the gifts of oratory, a passion for reading, an artful mind, and a furious but not always uncritical belief in the righteousness of any claims their fellows might bring. Taught by the Liberator O’Connell in the villages and townlands of Ireland to expect political results, the Irish were wringing slowly from America what they had historically craved, a place in the landscape”. (Keneally, 2000, 249) That many Irish immigrants into the US accumulated a moderate amount of wealth cannot be in doubt, since foreign-born Irish proved to be mobile after arrival and became the dominant ethnic group throughout the USA, per the US Census of 1860 (ll, 4B). But what of the destitute Irish arrivals who were stuck in the urban poverty traps of US cities? Ó Gráda has suggested that was not necessarily the case and cited … “Yet in economic historian Joseph Ferrie’s sample of antebellum immigrants, which links passenger lists and manuscript census data, less than one-fifth of the Irish who arrived in the Port of New York between 1840 and 1850 remained there on census day in 1850”. It would be remiss to ignore the bigotry that Irish Catholic emigrants experienced in the USA and other host countries (England and BNA) in the 1800s. Reasons have already been discussed, and the outcome was commonly vilification in the press and stereotypic caricature in cartoons as subhuman, frequently irate, and intoxicated apes. This unfortunate scenario can be dated back in Britain to London’s frustrations in handling strife in Ireland and the Rebellions of 1798 and 1848. James Gillray, in his 1798 “ United Irishmen in Training ” cartoon, portrayed the Irish as angry bestial brutes behaving absurdly outside a public house. “ The British Lion and The Irish Monkey ” appeared in Punch, 1st April 1848, and ridiculed John Mitchel as a small monkey in a jester’s hat, with a spear, taunting a superior, large, calm, British lion with a crown, and the British Navy in the background. Similar cartoons were published relating to the Young Irelanders. Mitchel was arrested, found guilty of seditious libel, sentenced to fourteen years transportation to Bermuda, and spent four days at the prison on Spike Island in late May 1848, before his deportation at the start of November. The Young Irelanders , William Smith O’Brien MP, the orator Thomas Francis Meagher, Terence Bellew MacManus, and journalist Patrick O’Donoghue were found guilty of treason-felony, sentenced to death, but commuted in 1849 to transportation for life in Van Diemen’s Land – a 14,000 miles voyage on the Swift. Negative caricatures of the Irish passed seamlessly from the 19 th century British Press to Protestant American news media, and similar Irish-bashing and stereotyping continued in Harpers and Puck , to the gratification of its proponents. And many of those proponents in the US were native-born Protestant Americans, strongly opposed to immigration and Roman Catholics, and who flourished in the 1840s and 1850s as the ‘Know Nothing Party’, which had bases in major US cities, later becoming the ‘American Party’. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania published the attached cartoon from Puck , as a sample of the same satirical humor that perpetuated beyond the American Civil War period.

144