The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

In spite, however, of the efforts made by British statesmen to direct the flow of Irish emigration to the northern part of the American Continent, the number of those who voluntarily crossed the Atlantic to settle directly in the United States was steadily increasing. Not only did they find there perfect freedom of religion, but the absence of clergymen was being gradually less felt, and each new bishopric created became a centre of religious life and vigor.

Moreover, the new republic had turned out to be the most energetic and enterprising nation which the world had yet seen. A whole continent lay before it to subdue, and at once the young giant prepared to grapple with the truly gigantic difficulty. With the arrival of every "packet-boat," Europe was astonished to hear of the amazing vitality displayed by a nation of yesterday, composed of a few millions of individuals, who had already spread their frontiers as far north as the whole line of the great lakes, as far west as the Pacific coast, and southward to the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana fell in, and, from a state of torpidity in which it had slumbered, the vast territory which then went by that name waked suddenly into a prodigiously active life. At the very beginning of the century, the Missouri had been navigated to its source, and Lewis and Clarke, crossing the high ridge of the Rocky Mountains, had descended the Columbia to its mouth, and settled the boundary of the United States along the far-spreading Pacific. The mighty Mississippi, in the midst of that splendid domain, belonged from source to mouth to the republic, and, with its tributaries, was already alive with numerous steamboats, passing up and down, bearing their life and all its belongings with them, and the (at that time more numerous still) flatboats, carried down the stream, to reach, in due time, New Orleans.

There was small thought of hindering "foreigners" from coming to take a share in the giant enterprise. All the inhabitants were in fact foreigners to the soil; and the new-comers, no matter from what country they came, had just as good a right to sit at the common board as the first-landed. It was felt and wisely acknowledged to be the real interest of the young nation to welcome as great a number as Europe could send.

Thus have we already seen large numbers of Irishmen laboring along the Erie Canal. There was not a public work undertaken at the time in which they did not bear a welcome hand. And what race of men could be found better fitted for such work? It would indeed be interesting to show from good statistical tables what share Irishmen have really had in building up the prosperity of the Union by their labor, skilled and unskilled.

At the period we have now come to, they were already crowding in at the harbors of the Atlantic, so astonishing to the newly- arrived European by the extraordinary activity which characterizes them; they were numerous in the factories just starting into life, from the desire of not depending on England for all manufactured goods; they were multiplying in large hotels, in private families, in the fields outside the large cities. Above all, the buildings erected at the time, in such great numbers, employed many of them as mechanics and laborers; and whenever some grand undertaking, which looked to the future welfare of the country, demanded a large draft of men, there were they to be seen as they had never been seen before, even in their own country, where all labor was reduced to the individual efforts of each, just sufficient to eke out a miserable life.

At this time, about 1820, the Irish immigrants settled, for the most part, on the Atlantic seaboard; few had yet crossed even the ridge of the Alleghanies. In the Eastern States they found occupation enough, and the steady growth of the country required their willing aid. From that time the North formed their chief point of attraction, and the States of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, were their great resorts. Even New England was no longer forbidden ground to them, and they began to spread themselves over its rocky and unpromising surface, to effect there a greater moral change than probably anywhere else in the country. In 1827, during the first pastoral visitation of Bishop Fenwick, when he erected, on the spot made memorable by the apostolic labors of Father Rasles, a monument to the memory of that saintly man, we read that "he then went in search of some Irish Catholics living at Belfast, Maine, whom he found suffering both for the necessaries of life and for the sustenance of the soul. He relieved both their temporal and spiritual wants, and imparted them his blessing, and some wholesome advice."

He was enabled to do more for them in the following year at Charlestown, Massachusetts. On the 15th of October, 1828, according to the Boston Gazette, "he laid the corner-stone of a Catholic church near Craigie's Point, designed to accommodate the Catholics of that place and of Charlestown, who were said to be already numerous." There is no doubt that the several churches built about that time in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, were filled rather by Irish immigrants than by American converts, although not a few consoling examples of this latter method of the Church's increase took place about this period.

But New York was taking the lead as the landing of predilection for the desolate children of Ireland. Thus, at the installation of Bishop Dubois, in St. Patrick's Cathedral, November 9, 1826, he addressed himself particularly to the Irish portion of his congregation, observing that "he entertained for them the liveliest feelings of affection. He reminded them of the persecutions they had undergone in defence of their religion, of the sacrifices many of them had made on leaving their native country, and conjured them always to manifest that attachment to the religion of their forefathers which had hitherto so prominently distinguished them among their brother Catholics."

The whole State was beginning to swarm with new arrivals from the Green Isle. This detachment, however, only formed the scarcely perceptible head of the great army which was to follow. We shall soon return to see its masses steadily treading their way on toward the West, and never halting till they reached the Pacific coast; we will see for what purpose.

Meanwhile, it is fitting to look at another wing of this army taking its position directly south of Asia, the great continent which holds the first dwelling of man on earth, and toward which all the tendencies of modern civilization seem to turn.