Southern England experienced a similar movement. The price of agricultural products, which had been forced up during the Napoleonic wars, fell steadily for a long time. Farmers could not make a living. The counties of Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, and Surrey were the chief centers of emigration. These people also turned their faces toward North America.
Ireland, too, was in perpetual ferment and the emigration from that island was increased as the result of the abortive revolutionary attempts of the United Irishmen in 1798 and 1803. After the leader of the latter, Robert Emmet, was executed, his elder brother, Thomas A. Emmet, came to New York, practised law, and within a decade became the attorney-general of the state. The Emmets, like most others of these Irish refugees, were Protestants in religion.
Later, in 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland, and soon after the starving peasantry, many of them from the lower types of western Ireland, swarmed over here. The women became domestic servants and the men day laborers, doing the heavy work of ditch digging and railroad building. They were Roman Catholic and that fact excited animosity in many sections of the country. They were not welcome in the West when they drifted there. It was not unusual to see on the frontier railroad stations and in advertisements in New York newspapers, "No Irish need apply." There was some violence and an American party was organized to check their entrance into local politics, for which they showed great aptitude.
Since then, these Irish have been forced upward in the social scale by later arriving immigrants over whom they had the advantage of speaking English. They became the nucleus in America of the present Roman Catholic Church, which has spread rapidly in this country. The Irish did not take to agriculture and have never shown much liking for the larger industries.
The total number of Irish immigrants during the forties and fifties amounted to more than a million and a half, and that first migration has been followed by a continuous stream of southern Irish down to the last few years when the quota restrictions went into effect.
ROMAN CATHOLICS
1930
As soon as they secured a certain amount of wealth and rose in the social scale, they established schools and colleges of their own, the teachings and, indeed, the existence of which conflict with those of the public-school system of the United States, and to that extent they have impaired the unity of the nation. Some regiments of Irish fought on the Northern side in the Civil War, but the draft riots of New York were caused by the Irish who did not want to fight for the Union. In addition to the shanty Irish there came over some middle-class families of importance.