The Transatlantic Roots of Irish American Anti-Abolitionism, 1843–1859

Abstract

That most immigrants opposed both abolitionist reformers and antislavery politicians in antebellum era was beyond dispute to contemporaries in all three camps. As early as 1842, abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison perceived and made it his mission to disrupt stupendous conspiracy ... between leading Demagogues, leading pseudo democrats, and southern slaveholders. More than a decade later, a Know Nothing Party-affiliated newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire, blamed the ignorance and superstition of a half a million semi-civilized voters for electoral successes of proslavery politicians. American newspaper editors disputed tenor if not specific complaint in these accusations. In 1856, New York Irish-American cheerfully acknowledged that Irish emigrants join Democratic Party and take sides against abolitionists before defending its readers against abolitionists' accusations that immigrants frequently and wantonly assaulted African Americans. (1) Scholarship on antislavery movement, antebellum sectional crisis, and immigration in Civil War era echoes contemporary consensus that Americans were foes to abolitionist reform and antislavery politics. (2) Historians are far from unanimous, however, in explaining why Americans were so singularly hostile to all shades of antislavery. Immigrants' fears of labor competition from freed slaves, their purported need to establish a white racial identity, their attachment to proslavery Democratic Party, and their receptiveness to influence of a proslavery American Catholic hierarchy have all weighed heavily in discussion. (3) Cumulatively, these explanations interpret American opposition to antislavery as a product of social, political, and cultural influences in America that shaped contours of immigrants' lives. Such an interpretation is useful in highlighting forces that acted on Americans as they encountered sectional politics and nascent industrial capitalist economy of antebellum America. But it can also convey impression that immigrants arrived in United States as blank slates, whose views on major social and political questions of day would be etched out by priests and ward bosses. Yet studies of Americans' involvement in Jacksonian-era politics, participation in Civil War, and resistance to exploitative labor conditions have shown that immigrants brought certain ideas and practices with them from Ireland. Under right circumstances, immigrants' backgrounds in Ireland or connections they maintained with their native land informed ways they adjusted to life in United States. (4) While history has featured prominently in more recent works on immigrants and antislavery, pre-famine era dominates scholarship. In years just prior to Great Potato Famine (1845-54), revered politician Daniel O'Connell insisted that on both sides of Atlantic--but especially Americans who supported his efforts to win political autonomy from Great Britain--make common cause with abolitionists. The historian Angela Murphy explains that Americans rejected O'Connell's antislavery pleas in order to demonstrate their bona fides as respectable American citizens who would not be beholden to foreign influences. On eve of famine migration, then, demands of loyalty to their adopted country led immigrants to spurn antislavery appeals from Ireland. Other works on pre-famine period similarly emphasize a contrast between popularity of antislavery in O'Connell's Ireland and an anti-abolitionist consensus among American Irish. (5) While most immigrants remained steadfastly opposed to antislavery throughout antebellum era, argument here is that basis of American anti-abolitionism shifted in late 1840s and early 1850s. …