THEY ALWAYS HAVE BEEN DEMOCRATS
The traditional fidelity of the Irish to the Democratic party began forthwith. The elements in the population which were Whigs, and afterward became Republicans tended, on the whole, to be the more prosperous folk of the community; also they were largely of the Protestant faith. Very early in our political history, therefore, there came to be, to some extent, a division in which both social standing and religion played a part. Most of the Irish were poor, and nearly all of them were Roman Catholics. The Democratic party was rather the party of the poor and the foreign born, and when the great influx of Roman Catholic Irish injected also the religious issue, it was only natural that a kind of racial allegiance should attach the Irish to the Democratic party. The Know-Nothing and Native American agitations of the middle of the last century deepened the rift, and confirmed the Irish in their political faith.
Gustavus Myers says, in his History of Tammany Hall:[8]
About the year 1840 ... Tammany began to be ruled from the bottom of the social stratum.... The policy of encouraging foreigners, at first mildly started in 1823, was now developed into a system. The Whigs antagonized the entrance of foreign-born citizens into politics, and the Native American Party was organized expressly to bar them almost entirely from the enjoyment of political rights. The immigrant had no place to turn but Tammany Hall. In part to assure itself this vote, the organization opened a bureau, a modest beginning of what became a colossal department. An office established in the Wigwam, to which specially paid agents or organization runners brought the immigrant, drilled into him the advantages of joining Tammany, and furnished him the means and legal machinery needed to take out his naturalization papers.... Tammany took the immigrant in charge, cared for him, made him feel that he was a human being with distinct political rights, and converted him into a citizen. How sagacious this was, each year revealed. Immigration soon poured in heavily, and there came a time when the foreign vote outnumbered that of the native-born citizens.
It is true, but irrelevant, that in an earlier day Tammany had been as anti-foreign as anybody—originally it was decidedly aristocratic in tone. Myers recites how, on the night of April 24, 1817, two hundred Irishmen marched to the Wigwam “to impress upon the Committee the wisdom of nominating (for Congress) Thomas Addis Emmett, as well as other Irish Catholics on the Tammany ticket in the future.”
All this had long since become ancient history by 1840. Long before that time the Irish devotion to the Democratic party in general, and to Tammany Hall in particular, had become deeply rooted.