Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

This feeling was intensified by the fact of which it was partly the cause, that when the Irish-Catholics first came over they voted in solid body, led often by their clergy, for the Democratic Party, which was in the minority in the New England States, especially in Massachusetts. England down to a very recent time disqualified the Catholics from civil office.

Our people forgot that the religious persecution, of which they cherished the bitter memory, was the result of the spirit of the age, and not of one form of religious faith. They forgot that the English Protestants not only retaliated on the Catholics when they got into power, but that the Bishops from whose fury, as John Milton said, our own Pilgrim Fathers fled, were Protestant Bishops and not Catholic. They forgot the eight hundred years during which Ireland had been under the heel of England, and the terrible history so well told by that most English of Englishmen, and Protestant of Protestants, Lord Macaulay.

"The Irish Roman Catholics were permitted to live, to be fruitful, to replenish the earth; but they were doomed to be what the Helots were in Sparta, what the Greeks were under the Ottoman, what the blacks now are at New York. Every man of the subject caste was strictly excluded from any public trust. Take what path he might in life, he was crossed at every step by some vexatious restriction. It was only by being obscure and inactive, that he could, on his native soil, be safe. If he aspired to be powerful and honoured, he might gain a cross or perhaps a Marshal's staff in the armies of France or Austria. If his vocation was to politics, he might distinguish himself in the diplomacy of Italy or Spain. But at home he was a mere Gibeonite, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. The statute book of Ireland was filled with enactments which furnish to the Roman Catholics but too good a ground for recriminating on us when we talk of the barbarities of Bonner and Gardiner; and the harshness of those odious laws was aggravated by a more odious administration. For, bad as the legislators were, the magistrates were worse still. In those evil times originated that most unhappy hostility between landlord and tenant, which is one of the peculiar curses of Ireland. Oppression and turbulence reciprocally generated each other. The combination of rustic tyrants was resisted by gangs of rustic banditii. Courts of law and juries existed only for the benefit of the dominant sect. Those priests who were revered by millions as their natural advisers and guardians, as the only authorised dispensers of the Christian sacraments, were treated by the squires and squireens of the ruling faction as no good-natured man would treat the vilest beggar."

When I came into political life shortly after 1848, I found this anti-Catholic feeling most intense. The Catholics in Massachusetts were, in general, in a very humble class. The immigration, which had well begun before the great Irish Famine, was increased very much by that terrible calamity. The Irishmen were glad to build our railroads at sixty cents a day, dwelling in wretched shanties, and living on very coarse fare. They had brought with them the habit of drinking whiskey, comparatively harmless in their native climate—though bad enough there— but destructive in New England. So they contributed very largely to the statistics of crime and disorder.

Even then they gave an example—from which all mankind might take a lesson—of many admirable qualities. They had a most pathetic and touching affection for the Old Country. They exhibited an incomparable generosity toward the kindred they had left behind. From their scanty earnings, Edward Everett, a high authority, estimates that there were sent twenty millions of dollars in four years to their parents and kindred.

There was some jealousy on the part of our working people, especially the men and women employed in large manufacturing establishments, lest the Irish, by working at cheaper wages, would drive them out of employment. But the Irishman soon learned to demand all the wages he could get. The accession of the Irish laborer increased largely the productive forces of the State. So there was more wealth created, of which the better educated and shrewder Yankee got the larger share. By the bringing in of a lower class of labor he was elevated to a higher place, but never driven out of work. The prejudice of which I have spoken showed itself in some terrible Protestant riots in New Orleans and in Baltimore, and in the burning of the Catholic Convent at Charlestown.

There was also a strong feeling that the compact body of Catholics, always voting for one political party was a danger to the public security. Of course this feeling manifested itself in the Whig Party, for whose adversary the solid Irish- Catholic vote was cast. As early as 1844, after the defeat of Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster made a suggestion—I do know where it is recorded now, but I was informed of it on good authority at about the time he made it—that there must be some public combination with a view to resist the influence of our foreign element in our politics.

But there was no political movement on any considerable scale until 1854. In that year there was a very dangerous crusade which came very near National success, and which got control of several States.

In the fall of 1857 the Republican Party elected its first Governor. The slavery question was still very prominent, and the people were deeply stirred by the attempt to repeal the Missouri Compromise. So in that year, under the leadership of Nathaniel P. Banks, Gardner, the Know-Nothing Governor, was defeated, and from that time the strength of Know-Nothingism was at an end. I was elected to the Senate in the fall of 1856 as the Republican candidate from the county of Worcester over the Know-Nothing and Democratic candidates.

It is a remarkable fact that of the men known to join the Know-Nothing Party, no man, unless he were exceedingly young and obscure when he did it, ever maintained or regained the public confidence afterward, with the exception of Henry Wilson, Anson Burlingame and Nathaniel P. Banks. These men all left it after the first year. Wilson and Burlingame denounced it with all the vigor at their command, and Banks led the forces of the Republican Party to its overthrow.