The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 / Edition 1

by David T. Gleeson

Overview

The only comprehensive study of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth-century South, this book makes a valuable contribution to the story of the Irish in America and to our understanding of southern culture.

The Irish who migrated to the Old South struggled to make a new home in a land where they were viewed as foreigners and were set apart by language, high rates of illiteracy, and their own self-identification as temporary exiles from famine and British misrule. They countered this isolation by creating vibrant, tightly knit ethnic communities in the cities and towns across the South where they found work, usually menial jobs. Finding strength in their communities, Irish immigrants developed the confidence to raise their voices in the public arena, forcing native southerners to recognize and accept them—first politically, then socially.

The Irish integrated into southern society without abandoning their ethnic identity. They displayed their loyalty by fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War and in particular by opposing the Radical Reconstruction that followed. By 1877, they were a unique part of the "Solid South." Unlike the Irish in other parts of the United States, the Irish in the South had to fit into a regional culture as well as American culture in general. By following their attempts to become southerners, we learn much about the unique experience of ethnicity in the American South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807849682
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/26/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

David T. Gleeson, a native of Ireland, is associate professor of history at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina.

Read an Excerpt

The Irish Diaspora

Like the Jews, to whom the term "diaspora" was first applied, the Irish also scattered to many countries throughout the world. The concept of flight, however, distinguishes a diaspora from general immigration. "Diaspora" implies that the migration was in some way involuntary. This perception of forced migration is a strong element in the folklore of Irish immigration. Even Irish people who made rational economic decisions to leave Ireland often felt that they had no choice at all. This fact was particularly true in the greatest period of Irish emigration—the nineteenth century. Most of the millions who left the island in this period were economic migrants. Most believed, however, that they were political exiles, driven out by Britain's misrule of their homeland. Thus, the Irish migrants who arrived in the United States were highly politicized. Upon arrival, they were already cognizant of not just the economic contrasts between America and Ireland but also the political differences. The Irish who came to the American South saw not only the variances between the two countries but also those between their new region and Ireland. Despite the harsh realities of immigrant life in the South, Irish immigrants' awareness of the contrast did not dissipate. Whatever calamity befell them, at least they were no longer under the heel of Irish landlords and the British legal and military regime that had enforced their misrule. Understanding why they left and what they perceived they had left behind is vital to comprehending the Irish immigrant experience in the nineteenth-century South.

"The Flight of the Earls" in 1607, when the leaders of Ireland's great sixteenth-century native rebellion abandoned their lands for friendlier Spain, began the tradition of England's interference in Ireland equaling Irish exile. Their flight provided an example for other unsuccessful rebels to follow. The soldiers defeated in trying to restore the Catholic King James II to his throne in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution became famous as the "Wild Geese" when they left Ireland to join various European armies. Their defeat affirmed William of Orange as the new king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In Ireland his victory ushered in the era of the Ascendancy, a minority Anglican ruling class. The Ascendancy wanted to make sure that Catholic Ireland never again flexed its military or political muscle. Through their parliament in Dublin, members of the Ascendancy systematically kept Catholics, and Dissenters, out of political power. Dismissing Catholics as dangerous ignorant papists, they passed a series of discriminatory religious, economic, and political "penal laws" and made the majority of the Irish population second-class citizens in their own country.[1]

Resentment among the disfranchised remained, however. Although the 1690 victory was more complete than any other English attempt to control the Catholic native Irish, the victors did not eradicate or expel the defeated. In many parts of Ireland, Catholics remained on or close to their ancestral lands. Here a culture of alienation grew among the old landed elites who longed nostalgically for the good old days before the interference of the horrible foreigners from England. This disaffection was best illustrated in the contemporary Gaelic poetry. Poets railed against "Saxon curs," "Luther's followers," and "Calvin's mob." In their poems, the misfortune these foreigners had brought on Ireland made the Irish people the most oppressed in the world. Only the Jews, one Dublin writer believed, were more unfortunate and more ensnared in "daoirse" (slavery) than the Irish.[2] This resentment permeated the popular culture of the poorer Irish. Even those who managed to survive the sporadically enforced penal laws and restore some form of economic prosperity remained aware of the previous dispossession and the continued potential of their return to abject poverty.[3]

The majority of Ireland's Catholics did live in poverty. Ireland endured two major famines, and barely avoided several more, in the eighteenth century. Outbursts of agrarian violence were common and occasionally substantial.[4] Escape to the New World in the eighteenth century did not provide the opportunities that it would in the nineteenth century. Those who ended up in the American colonies usually had not chosen to go there. According to Kerby Miller, approximately 100,000 Irish Catholics "emigrated" to the British American colonies in the eighteenth century. Quickly finding themselves handicapped by "poverty, bond service and the recruiting sergeant," Irish Catholic colonials tended to work as indentured servants, to be convicts, or to serve as members of the British armed forces. They usually "toiled in obscure places for hard taskmasters" and lived rather "brutish lives." Miller believes that these emigrants were "rootless" in "familial and cultural" terms, because they usually emigrated as individuals rather than as family units. They were dispersed throughout the colonies, and by necessity English became their public language. Their families at home in Ireland, however, continued to speak Gaelic.[5] They also lost their Catholicism. Having left an Ireland with a very weak church structure for the colonies, where Catholicism barely existed, migrants who wanted any religious solace had to become Protestant. Nineteenth-century Irish clerics who came to the South determined not to let contemporary immigrants go the way of their eighteenth-century predecessors. Because of the previous cultural breakdown and resulting disappearance of their relatives and friends, the Irish conceived of America as a dark place of exile where loved ones were never heard from again.

A second group of Irish people perceived America differently. They did not take as long to become enamored with North America. The Protestant residents of the northern part of Ireland, whose ancestors had come from Scotland and England and who had been "planted" (i.e., settled on land seized from the native Irish by the English Crown) in the province of Ulster since the early 1600s, saw America more as an escape than an exile.[6] These Ulster folk, known in popular terms as the "Scots Irish," were predominantly Presbyterian.[7] Their religious dissent led the Anglican-dominated Irish parliament to discriminate against them, despite the Dissenters' crucial role in King William's victory in Ireland. The Anglican rulers of eighteenth-century Ireland saw the Ulster Presbyterians as a serious threat to their power and influence, because, unlike the disfranchised Irish Catholics, Dissenters remained a vociferous political force. The authorities passed a series of laws that withdrew official recognition of Dissenter marriages and made nonattendance at Anglican services and nonrecognition of Anglican episcopal authority prosecutable offenses. In 1704, the Test Act stated that all public officeholders had to take sacraments in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. Despite the passage of the Toleration Act in 1719, Church of Ireland clergy and politicians continued to discriminate against Presbyterians.[8]

Along with religious persecution, Ulster Presbyterians also faced economic hardship. With the acquiescence of the Ascendancy, English protectionism restricted Irish wool exports. This action brought about the growth of and subsequent dependence upon a linen industry in Ulster. Periodic crises in the linen industry led to falling prices for flax, increased rents, and ultimately evictions. The Scots Irish settlers, therefore, faced two prospects: stay and resist prejudice and economic uncertainty, or, like their ancestors, begin a new life somewhere else. Thousands opted for the latter.[9]

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Forgotten People of the Old South
1. The Irish Diaspora
2. Urban Pioneers in the Old South
3. Earning a Living
4. Family, Community, and Ethnic Awareness
5. Keeping the Faith
6. The Irish, the Natives, and Politics
7. The Know-Nothing Challenge
8. Slavery, State Rights, and Secession
9. The Green and the Gray
10. Irish Confederates
11. Postwar Integration
Conclusion: Irish Southerners
Appendix: Occupational Status Classification
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Gleeson's study of Irish immigrants in the eleven states of the lower and upper South is a most welcome first of its kind.—South Carolina Historical Magazine



[An] insightful and impressively-researched work. . . . Written in clear prose and accentuated with useful and revealing statistics.—Virginia Quarterly Review



An accessible and wide-ranging survey of Irish assimilation in the South. . . . Gleeson's work both expands the story of Irish Americans and delightfully complicates visions of the economic, social, religious and political experience of 'plain folk' in the antebellum South.—Georgia Historical Quarterly



Gleeson makes a convincing case that the southern Irish represent an important untold story of the Irish in America.—American Historical Review



Deeply researched. . . . [Gleeson] provides a fascinating and fresh insight into the role of the Southern Irish in the post-Civil War years and Reconstruction.—Civil War Book Review



Gleeson's extensive research and the clarity of his writing make this book an invaluable contribution to the historical literature on the nineteenth-century South.—Journal of Southern History



Historians have long recognized the need for a comprehensive study of Irish Americans living in the 19th-century South. David T. Gleeson fills the critical gap with this insightful and impressively-researched work. . . written in clear prose and accentuated with useful and revealing statistics. . . . Readers will learn much from this important work.—Virginia Quarterly Review



[Gleeson] informs our understanding of the Irish in all parts of America, and . . . deserves praise and thanks for telling us something of those lives.—Journal of American Ethnic History



Thoroughly researched and clearly and often engagingly written, this is an important book that deserves serious attention.—Journal of American History



Gleeson's book is a great contribution toward understanding the complicated nature of the southern Irish in American history.—Choice



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Editorial Reviews

David T. Gleeson demonstrates that Irish America comes in different shades of green. In his perceptive, well-researched, and readable "The Irish in the South, 1815-1877" he reveals its regional diversity. (Lawrence J. McCaffrey, author of "The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America" and "Textures of Irish America")

From the Publisher

David T. Gleeson demonstrates that Irish America comes in different shades of green. In his perceptive, well-researched, and readable The Irish in the South, 1815-1877 he reveals its regional diversity.

Lawrence J. McCaffrey