6 Irish
Irish Immigration in the Colonial Era
The first significant influx of Irish settlers in North America occurred from about 1715 to the early 1800s. These settlers comprised the so-called Scotch-Irish, a group that we have already discussed at some length in Chapter 3 and about whom we will not have much to say in this chapter. This group tended to be Protestant, specifically Presbyterian, and while often referred to at the time simply as Irish, in actuality there may have been many more Scottish and English among them than Irish. One could perhaps forgive the Irish Catholics, who were at any rate a distinct minority around that time, for declaring that the only thing Irish about many of the Scotch-Irish was in their having come largely from lands that had been wrested from Irish Catholic landowners during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Be that as it may, prior to the early 19th century, the term Irish referred to both of these groups. And as long as the Protestants comprised the majority of the immigrants, as they did until the 1830s, they were happy to be known simply as Irish. But “as political and religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants both in Ireland and the United States became more frequent, and as Catholic immigrants began to outnumber Protestants, the term Irish became synonymous with Irish Catholics.”[1] Indeed, from about 1830s on, the vast majority of Irish immigrants would be Catholic, a reality that will be discussed in more depth later in this chapter.
Flight from Ireland and Resettlement
Faced with overpopulation, lack of economic opportunity, and English oppression, a million Irish headed to the U.S. between 1815 and 1845 in search of better lives. It was an age of infrastructure development in the U.S., devoted to the building of roads, canals, and harbors, and thousands of Irish men found work as laborers.[2]
Then in 1845, a potato blight struck Ireland, wiping out 40% of the potato crop, the main and sometimes only food available to many Irish peasants. To make matters worse, the blight recurred periodically for over a decade; one million Irish people died of starvation and another million-and-a-half migrated to the U.S. and Canada. While the first wave of Irish migration had been a mostly male phenomenon, the second wave brought whole families to cities and towns throughout the Northeast.[3]
After the potato famines passed, the pace of Irish immigration slowed. Even so, between 1855 and 1900, another two million Irish immigrants arrived in the U.S. Throughout the 19th century, Irish laborers were present wherever there was a need for labor. Brigades of Irish men, sometimes as many as a thousand strong, labored in coal mines and on canals, railroads, and highways. The Irish did back-breaking labor, and project bosses exploited them with little regard for their humanity. They were often assigned to the hardest and most dangerous work, and it was not uncommon for workers to be blinded, maimed, or killed in acci