For the eighty years back of 1820 the proportion of Irish immigrants was even larger—probably one in four. And it was not, as many of the descendants of the early Irish immigration have imagined, entirely of the better off and entirely from the north of Ireland. Doubtless the Presbyterians of the northern Irish counties predominated, and counted in their ranks men of the learned professions as well as artificers and merchants, but of the tens of thousands of pure Celts from the central, southern and western counties deported to the West Indies in the seventeenth century many thousands found their way to the settlements of what are now the southern states of the Union. Original researches among colonial records by a member of our society show that during the century and a half before the Revolution several thousand immigrants of Celtic stock came direct to the colonies from Ireland.
Of the Irish emigration before the Revolution and up to 1820, the presence in New York of numbers of Irish high in standing as well as stalwart in activity is easily proven. One of the leading merchants in 1655 bore the historic name of Hugh O’Neale. New York City received its first charter from the hands of Sir Thomas Dougan, an Irishman, in 1684. Many old Irish names appear in the census of the City of New York for 1703. New York’s first mayor after the Revolution, James Duane, was the son of a Galway man. The first governor of the State of New York, and afterwards vice-president of the United States, George Clinton, was also an Irishman’s son. His kinsman, DeWitt Clinton, was a mayor of New York, United States senator and governor of the State, and is known to history as “the father of the Erie Canal.” Christopher Colles, from County Cork, Ireland, was the originator of our system of rail and waterways. His grave is in St. Paul’s. Thomas Addis Emmet, a resident of New York, was attorney general of the State. Daniel O’Brien established the first ferry to Perth Amboy. Dominick Lynch first introduced Italian opera to our city. He was also the founder of the Town of Rome, N. Y.
Resounding names of men of Irish blood are, indeed, plentiful, but they are only in this paper to be taken as symptomatic of the Irish-born and descended population, gradually growing in the city to a commanding influence. Peter McCartee was an alderman in 1815, and John McManus marshal of police in the same year. Irish names grew to prominence not only in the police and fire departments, but in the ranks of the teachers in the public schools. Of this eminence in three branches of the public service perhaps the greatest stress should be laid on the last. As school teachers, women and men, the Irish and Irish-descended have held the front place, in brains as well as numbers, for a hundred years in New York, holding it still, from William H. Maxwell, the great superintendent of the past twenty years, down to the latest teachers in the primary grades.
As early as 1833 it was computed that there were 44,000 of Irish birth or descent in New York City, which at that time meant Manhattan Island only. But the days were at hand when the combination of famine with brutal oppression was about to result in the casting forth from Ireland literally of millions of our people. That America should receive the greatest share was inevitable, and that New York should receive, if only for a temporary stay, the majority of these was natural. From 1846 to 1860 fully a million and a half of the famine-driven children of Ireland were poured upon the shores of America. And they came, for the very largest part, poorly clad, unlettered, uncouth, often weakened sorely in body by prolonged semi-starvation. Thousands—men, women and children—died of ship fever, of sea-sickness in debilitated frames, of inability to digest the wretched food supplied them on the long passage in the overcrowded sailing ships of the day. How many died of heartbreak alone, God only knows. But the survivors! In their bodies, at least, they soon vindicated the indestructibility of the Celt. Unskilled, except in a very small fraction, they took up the hardest kind of labor. They built the railroads, the canals; they “carried cities upon their backs.” It was a terrible story, working slowly to a happier consummation. They brought an instinctive loyalty to American institutions. Bitter were the prejudices they had to face, but they managed to outlive them all.
Naturally, in such case, they clung together. New York already had given the Irish exiles a home. Here their real qualities had had time to assert themselves, and here, accordingly, the newcomers of the later forties and early fifties settled freely. In politics they became Democrats, simply because Democracy never joined in their proscription as emigrants unfit to be Americans, while other parties did in lesser or greater degree. In religion they remained Catholic or Protestant as they came, and that meant largely Catholic.
This large substratum of newcomers from Ireland found here, as has been intimated, a large and fairly prospering Irish-born and Irish-descended population—furnishing men of eminence to all the higher callings—judges, lawyers, clergymen, physicians, merchants and manufacturers. With an assimilation more rapid than with any other race, the famine-exiles took up the order of American life. Their children filled the public schools and found Irish teachers there. They attended and supported churches whose hierarchy from archbishop to priest was almost wholly Irish. Thus the Celtic complexion of the city was enhanced, and it is no doubt true that at the outbreak of the Civil War, the population of New York (Manhattan) was nearer to one-third than one-fourth of Irish blood.
It is not the purpose to pursue here the history of the Irish in New York City from the outbreak of the Civil War through the half century to our day. To the battle for the Union, however, the New York Irish furnished magnificent quotas of fighting men, and capable officers, earning names for bravery and skill, as would be expected of their race. Indeed, it was the whole-souled devotion of the Irish all over the northern states and their brilliant services in the field and on the sea that threw down the last barriers of prejudice against their people in America. Such a name as Phil Sheridan’s was one to charm with, not to name another of the galaxy of great Irish captains of the war.
The Irish immigrant stream was, however, still flowing. From 1861 to 1900 they numbered over 2,000,000 souls, but this later flood came in somewhat better estate than their forerunners—fairly equalling in condition the concurrent German immigration and easily surpassing all others. It is for the most part, naturally, of these comers since 1860, that our Irish-born of today are composed, and through the entire country they can be found in substantial positions. But it is of their children and the children and grandchildren of the earlier immigration that the wonder-story of worldly uprise is to be told. New York, of course, has its share, and a large one, in this. If we can pick out from the later decades of the nineteenth century such names as James T. Brady and Charles O’Conor at the bar, A. T. Stewart among the merchants, Eugene Kelly among the bankers, William H. Grace, the great pioneer merchant of South America and twice our mayor; Archbishop Hughes, Cardinal McCloskey among the clerics, John W. Mackay among the great capitalists, Augustus St. Gaudens among the sculptors, O’Callaghan, Murphy and O’Reilly among the historians, how many names of eminence in every walk of art, science, law, religion, commerce, manufacture can be furnished from the Irish-born and Irish-descended of today! There are the great builders like John B. McDonald, who constructed the subway; James Coleman, who built the great Croton dam; but why enter on a list as long as that of the ships in Homer? Be it Thomas Fortune Ryan or John D. Crimmins in the world of finance, the representatives of Irish brain are there. It is of record that the second president of the New York Chamber of Commerce, which was founded in 1768, was Hugh Wallace, an Irishman. It is worthy of remark that Alexander E. Orr, also a native of Ireland, was president of the same body, until a year ago, and that his successor is J. Edward Simmons, also of Irish blood, who in his time has been lawyer, bank president, President of the Stock Exchange, President of the Board of Education and President of the New York Clearing House.
It is, however, to the collective work of the Irish of New York one had better turn. From the United States census of 1900 it is deduced that the natives of Ireland in Greater New York numbered 285,000, while the children of Irish parents numbered 308,000, and the descendants of Irish in the third and fourth generations numbered 200,000, or a total of 793,000 of Irish blood in a total for the city of 3,437,000—a proportion little less than one in four. With the increase of the city’s population since 1900 it is not quite likely that the Irish stock has kept pace, and a diminishing ratio in point of numbers may be expected. The inflow from southeastern Europe, from Poland, Russia and Italy has greatly (and happily) exceeded the stream from Ireland. Yet here in New York will be found, when the census of this year is taken, an Ireland of not far from a million, in its expected total approaching 5,000,000 souls.
Not all of that million remembers Old Ireland as Motherland, but it must be the task of societies like ours to awaken the sleeping memories.