Races and Immigrants in America

by John R. Commons

The third and most important cause of eminence, apart from ancestry, is the industrial and legal environment. An agricultural community produces very few eminent men compared with the number produced where manufactures and commerce vie with agriculture to attract the youth. A state of widely diversified industrial interests is likely to create widely diversified intellectual and moral interests. Complicated problems of industry and politics stimulate the mind and reflect their influence in literature, art, education, science, and the learned professions. Most of all, equal opportunity for all classes and large prizes for the ambitious and industrious serve to stimulate individuals of native ability to their highest endeavor. It was the deadening effects of slavery, creating inequalities among the whites themselves, that smothered the genius of the Southerner whether Englishman, Huguenot, or Scotch-Irish, and it was the free institutions of the North that invited their genius to unfold and blossom.

These considerations lead us to look with distrust on the claims of those who find in race ancestry or in race intermixture the reasons for such eminence as Americans have attained. While the race factor is decisive when it marks off inferior and primitive races, yet, in considering those Europeans races which have joined in our civilization, the important questions are: From what social classes is immigration drawn? and, Do our social institutions offer free opportunity and high incentive to the youth of ability? In so far as we get a choice selection of immigrants, and in so far as we afford them free scope for their native gifts, so far do they render to our country the services of genius, talent, and industry.

Incentives to Immigration.—It is the distinctive fact regarding colonial migration that it was Teutonic in blood and Protestant in religion. The English, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, and even the Scotch-Irish, who constituted practically the entire migration, were less than two thousand years ago one Germanic race in the forests surrounding the North Sea. The Protestant Reformation, sixteen centuries later, began among those peoples and found in them its sturdiest supporters. The doctrines of the Reformation, adapted as they were to the strong individualism of the Germanic races, prepared the hearts of men for the doctrines of political liberty and constitutional government of the succeeding century. The Reformation banished the idea that men must seek salvation through the intercession of priests and popes, who, however sacred, are only fellow-men, and set up the idea that each soul has direct access to God. With the Bible as a guide and his own conscience as a judge, each man was accountable only to one divine sovereign.

From the standpoint of the age this doctrine was too radical. It tended to break up existing society into sects and factions, and to precipitate those civil and religious wars which ended in a Catholic or aristocratic reaction. When this reaction came, the numerous Protestant sects of the extremer types found themselves the objects of persecution, and nothing remained but to seek a new land where the heavy hand of repression could not reach them. Thus America became the home of numberless religious sects and denominations of these several races. From England came Congregationalists (the “Pilgrims”), Puritans, Quakers, Baptists; from Scotland and Ireland came Presbyterians; from Germany came Quakers, Dunkards, Pietists, Ridge Hermits, Salzburgers, and Moravians.

It is not to be inferred that religious persecution alone in the early colonial period caused emigration. In point of numbers commercial enterprise was probably equally influential. In Holland all religious sects were welcomed with a liberality far in advance of any other nation, and at the same time the Dutch people were the most advanced in the modern pursuits of trade and commerce. The Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam was therefore a business enterprise, and neither before nor after the conquest by the British was there any religious obstacle to the reception of other races and religions. In this respect New York differed widely from New England, where religious exclusiveness preserved the English race as a peculiar people until the middle of the nineteenth century. So diverse were the races in New York, and so liberal were the opportunities open to all, that Governor Horatio Seymour was able to say that nine men prominent in its early history represented the same number of nationalities. Schuyler was of Dutch descent, Herkimer of German, Jay of French, Livingston of Scotch, Clinton of Irish, Morris of Welsh, Hoffman of Swedish, while Hamilton was a West India Englishman and Baron Steuben a Prussian.[8]

Another colony to which all races and religions were welcomed was Pennsylvania. William Penn established this colony both as a refuge for the persecuted Quakers of England and as a real estate venture. He was the first American to advertise his dominions widely throughout Europe, offering to sell one hundred acres of land at two English pounds and a low rental. His advertisements combined humanity and business, for they called attention to popular government and universal suffrage; equal rights to all regardless of race or religious belief; trial by jury; murder and treason the only capital crimes, and reformation, not retaliation, the object of punishment for other offences. Thus Pennsylvania, although settled a half century later than the Southern and Northern colonies, soon exceeded them in population. Penn sent his agents to Germany and persuaded large numbers of German Quakers and Pietists to cast their lot in his plantation, so that in twenty years the Germans numbered nearly one-half the population. Again, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Louis XIV overran the Palatinate and thousands of Germans fled to England, the English government encouraged their migration to America. In one year four thousand of them, the largest single emigration of the colonial period, embarked for New York, but their treatment was so illiberal that they moved to Pennsylvania, and thenceforth the German migration sought the latter colony. These people settled at Germantown, near Philadelphia, and occupied the counties of Bucks and Montgomery, where they continue to this day with their peculiar language, the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” Not only William Penn himself, but other landowners in Pennsylvania and also the shipowners advertised the country in Germany, and thousands of the poorer sort of Germans were induced to indenture themselves to the settlers to whom they were auctioned off by the ship captains in payment for transportation. Probably one-half of all the immigrants of the colonial period came under this system of postpaid transportation, just as at the present time nearly two-thirds come on prepaid tickets. It was in Pennsylvania that the largest portion of the Scotch-Irish settled, and before the time of the Revolution that colony had become the most populous and most diversified of all the colonies. It was the only colony, except Maryland, that tolerated Roman Catholics, and with all phases of the Christian religion and all branches of the Teutonic and Celtic races, Pennsylvania set the original type to which all of America has conformed, that of race intermixture on the basis of religious and political equality.

The Scotch-Irish.—It has long been recognized that among the most virile and aggressive people who came to America in colonial times, and who have contributed a peculiar share to the American character, are the Scotch-Irish. Their descendants boast of their ancestry and cite long lists of notables as their coderivatives. Yet until recent years it has been the misfortune of the Scotch-Irish to have escaped historical investigation; for American history has been written chiefly in New England, whose colonial Puritans forbade them in their midst. In fact, from the earliest settlement, the Scotch-Irish have been pioneers and men of action. They have contributed to America few writers and artists, but many generals, politicians, and captains of industry. In literature they claim two eminent names, Irving and Poe; but in the army, navy, politics, and business they claim John Paul Jones, Perry, Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, George B. McClellan, Alexander Hamilton, John C. Calhoun, James G. Blaine, Jefferson Davis, Thomas Benton, Hendricks, John G. Carlisle, Mark Hanna, William McKinley, Matthew S. Quay, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Horace Greeley, Henry Watterson, and hundreds alike famous in the more strenuous movements of American life.

A paradoxical fact regarding the Scotch-Irish is that they are very little Scotch and much less Irish. That is to say, they do not belong mainly to the so-called Celtic race, but they are the most composite of all the people of the British Isles. They are called Scots because they lived in Scotia, and they are called Irish because they moved to Ireland. Geography and not ethnology has given them their name. They are a mixed race through whose veins run the Celtic blood of the primitive Scot and Pict, the primitive Briton, the primitive Irish, but with a larger admixture of the later Norwegian, Dane, Saxon, and Angle. How this amalgamation came about we may learn from the geography of Scotland.

The Highlands of Scotland begin at the Grampian Hills and the Lowlands extend south from this line to the British border, and include the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Scotch-Irish came from that southwestern part of the Lowlands which bulges out toward Ireland north of the Solway Firth. Over these Lowland counties, bounded by water and hills on three sides, successive waves of conquest and migration followed. First the primitive Caledonian or Pict was driven to the Highlands, which to this day is the Celtic portion of Scotland. The Briton from the south, pressed on by Roman and then by Teuton, occupied the country. Then Irish tribes crossed over and gained a permanent hold. Then the Norwegian sailors came around from the north, and to this day there are pure Scandinavian types on the adjacent islands. Then the Saxons and Angles, driven by the Danes and Normans, gained a foothold from the east, and lastly the Danes themselves added their contingent. Here in this Lowland pocket of territory, no larger than a good-sized American county, was compounded for five hundred years this remarkable amalgam of races.

A thousand years later, after they had become a united people and had shown their metal in the trying times of the Reformation, they furnished the emigrants who displaced the Irish in the north of Ireland. James I, whom Scotland gave to England, determined to transform Catholic Ireland into Protestant England, and thereupon confiscated the lands of the native chiefs in Ulster and bestowed them upon Scottish and English lords on condition that they settle the territory with tenants from Scotland and England. This was the “great settlement” of 1610, and from that time to the present Ulster has been the Protestant stronghold of Ireland. In 1901 the population of Ulster was 44 per cent Catholic, 23 per cent Episcopalian, and 27 per cent Presbyterian, an ecclesiastical division corresponding almost exactly to the racial division of Irish, English, and Scotch. During the whole of the seventeenth century—the first century of this occupation—the Catholics and Episcopalians were in a much smaller proportion than these figures show for the present time, and the relative increase in Irish and Episcopalians during the eighteenth century was closely connected with the migration of the Scotch to America.