The Irish in the South, 1815–1877

Abstract

One of the most exciting and significant themes in Irish immigrant history has been the importance of local, regional, and even national variations in the experiences of the Irish living in the many countries of what has been called the Irish Diaspora. Over the last thirty years, for example, historians have argued that Irish immigrants fared significantly better in the favorable environments of the American Far West and Midwest or even in Canada and Australia than they did in Boston, the rest of New England, or New York City. Dr. David T. Gleeson's book builds on this previous work as it sets out to explore the question of how and why Irish immigrant experiences in the nineteenth-century American South also differed from those in the Northeast. Gleeson asserts that “native tolerance” of the Irish in the South was one critical reason for such differences (p. 192). He cites several possible reasons for such tolerance, but the most significant and intriguing of them center on the Irish immigrant' enthusiastic endorsement of slavery and white supremacy, which allayed southern native' suspicions of Irish commitments to Catholicism or to Irish nationalism. Gleeson quotes one Protestant southerner who noted approvingly, “Popery …[is] a horrid system,” but the Catholic Church is “the most conservative church in the Union on the subject of slavery” (p. 119).