CHAPTER 1

The Crisis of Citizenship in the 1850s

A crisis of citizenship wracked the United States between the Mexican War and the Civil War. Debate concerning slavery, citizenship for free blacks and immigrants, and the rights applicable to both groups, intensified during the 1850s. These discussions reveal a broader question with which society wrestled in the decade before the Civil War and another one that it tried to avoid: Who comprised the American people and what did citizenship mean?

The idea of citizenship based on voluntary consent emerged during the Revolutionary era, when Americans rejected subjectship and developed the concept that individuals had the right to choose their allegiance. What citizenship meant in practice, however, remained ambiguous. Because national citizenship implicated relations between the state and federal governments, and rights enforceable against either, unsettled questions arising from the doctrine of federalism complicated its definition. Moreover, who “the people” included remained contested and undefined during the first half of the nineteenth century.1

Competing impulses in America during the 1850s helped to heighten the crisis of citizenship. The divergence between North and South, accelerated by industrialization and the market revolution, crystallized at a time when the unifying force of the struggles of the early Republic faded into history. Formerly marginal arguments on both sides of the debate over slavery began to take central stage, while social transformations such as industrialization, urbanization, and immigration unevenly affected different sections of the country, exacerbated strains, and generated additional questions and concerns of their own. Rather than unify the country, victory in the Mexican War complicated these broad forces and brought all of this tumult and uncertainty to a head.

African Americans before the Civil War

As of 1860, fifteen slaveholding states contained approximately 3,954,000 slaves who were considered property to be bought, sold, and treated largely as their masters wished. Another 262,000 free blacks lived in the slaveholding states, but few of the rights whites held applied to them. The North contained 226,000 free blacks by 1860 who, in contrast to bondage in the South, enjoyed at least basic legal rights such as the ability to purchase and sell property, educate themselves, enter into contracts, sue, and assemble in public meetings or conventions. In most Northern states, blacks could testify against whites; in some, black men could vote.2

Slavery as a legal institution justified excluding from national citizenship those blacks held in bondage because property could neither have a national identity nor hold membership in society. The existence of free blacks born in America, however, created a problem: they did not have alien status, nor did the tribal allegiance which justified the exclusion of Native Americans from national citizenship apply to them. Free blacks could not be considered property, and they had a claim to national citizenship by birthright when born on U.S. soil. On the other hand, recognizing free blacks as national citizens involved several controversial implications. Questions about federalism, and the role played by federal and state governments in defining rights and privileges, complicated the issue. Moreover, white Americans recognized that an acknowledgment of national citizenship for free native-born blacks could then be used to challenge the treatment of slaves as property, threatening the institution of slavery as well as the national compromise which tolerated its survival. Additionally, many white Americans did not want to extend to blacks rights and privileges equal to the ones they held, and they feared that recognition of national citizenship for free blacks might lead to that result. Even many whites who opposed slavery held racist views of blacks as inferior and unfit for citizenship or equality.3

Two options existed so as to resolve the problem of national citizenship for free blacks: total exclusion, despite the moral implications this raised and the contradiction this posed to the concepts of birthright citizenship and citizenship by consent; or, recognition of free blacks as national citizens and confronting the challenges that went along with doing so. Chief Justice Taney of the Supreme Court chose exclusion in his 1857 Dred Scott ruling. Taney declared that no blacks, not even free blacks who could vote in the states where they resided, could be U.S. citizens. Additionally, Taney declared that blacks held no rights that whites had to respect. Any rights that blacks possessed were at the whim of state legislatures, and they continued to suffer curtailment of rights in both official (for example, they could not obtain patents) and unofficial ways.4

While blacks in the North enjoyed freedom and some rights, they also confronted political, economic, and social strictures that varied across the states, as well as private acts of discrimination that kept most of them at the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder. At the time of the Civil War, only Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island permitted black men to vote on the same terms as white men. After black leader Benjamin F. Roberts challenged Boston regulations that required his five-year-old daughter to travel an extra distance in order to attend an all-black school, Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 1850 that segregated schools did not violate the equal rights secured for blacks by that state’s constitution. In 1855, Boston would desegregate its schools. In the 1850s, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Oregon passed measures, enforced to varying degrees, to prevent migration of free blacks into their states and, as of 1860, blacks could not testify against whites in Indiana, Illinois, California, and Oregon. Oregon removed this stricture in 1862 and California did so by 1863. Older and more Northern states tended to provide more rights, while newer states and those closer to the South proved less egalitarian. Attitudes toward blacks varied even within states: racism in Cincinnati contrasted with the tolerance manifested by Ohio’s Oberlin College, which began to admit black students in 1835. In upstate New York in the 1840s and 1850s, integrated schools in Syracuse differed from segregated schools in Buffalo and Albany.5

Irish Americans before the Civil War

Irish Americans before the Civil War faced neither slavery nor the legal strictures that blacks confronted, and they could become U.S. citizens. Nonetheless, Irish Americans occupied a tenuous position, and the debates about their status that took place during the 1850s illuminate the hotly contested prewar discussion about American citizenship.

Even the meaning of naturalization remained unsettled as of the Civil War. The Constitution remained silent about the definition of American citizenship, much less whether any distinctions attached to those who naturalized (except as to eligibility to hold the presidency and vice presidency). Moreover, for decades before the Civil War, Americans generally embraced expatriation rights, the doctrine that people held a right to opt out of their birth citizenship, emigrate from their native land, and naturalize where they chose. The United States did not vigorously enforce this policy abroad, however, and confusion reigned over the actual rights and protections enjoyed by naturalized American citizens who returned to visit their homeland. Congress refrained from legislating on the issue, and conflicting rulings from the judiciary and State Department further muddled the matter.

Many native-born Protestant Americans questioned whether the Catholic faith and foreign background of Irish immigrants precluded them from becoming Americans. Anti-Catholic prejudice had run through the United States since the colonial days, and the impulse intensified by 1834, when a mob burned down a convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Lurid books recounted purported sexual depravity within convents, while polemical works by Reverend Lyman Beecher and Samuel F. B. Morse in 1835 argued that Catholicism jeopardized Protestantism and republicanism in America. Anti-Catholicism even infected the construction of the Washington Monument, as nativists pared from it and sank into the Potomac River a block of stone donated by Catholics.6

Nativism strengthened during the 1850s amid debate over Catholic schools, practices, and a growing Catholic demographic presence. Between 1845 and 1851, at the same time debate intensified as to whether blacks could fit into “the people,” three quarters of a million Irish flooded into the United States and frightened many native-born Americans with their poverty, foreignness, and the potential of their political influence. By 1855, the Irish-born population in Boston swelled past 50,000 mostly impoverished immigrants. By 1850, 29,963 Irish-born individuals comprised a fifth of Chicago’s population, and by 1860, 95,548 Irish-born made up more than 16 percent of Philadelphia’s population; they comprised almost 26 percent of Boston’s and New York City’s populations as well.7

Famine Irish immigrants lacked capital or education and needed immediate employment, forcing them to rely heavily on unskilled positions. While this cheap labor pool spurred industrial growth in some cities, Irish American laborers found their wages low and working conditions poor. Many Famine Irish packed into their city’s slum district where putrid air and contaminated water fostered disease in epidemic proportions. Hard labor and low quality of life led to great indulgence in alcohol, and groggeries not only provided cheap whiskey, they served as centers of political activity for Irish immigrants courted by the Democratic Party as a source of votes. The poverty of the newcomers exacerbated nativism. By 1855, Massachusetts’s nativist governor Henry Gardner successfully called for deportation of alien paupers by arguing it was cheaper to return them to Liverpool than it was to support them.8

Life remained difficult even for the many Irish immigrants who only paused in the eastern seaboard cities to regroup before moving elsewhere. Although smaller cities, towns, and rural regions generally showed more welcome to the newcomers, immigrants there still often fared poorly. Just as blacks experienced different attitudes toward them across the country, so also did the Irish. In the Midwest, a demand for labor sometimes trumped prejudice and, in contrast to the Northeast, some less-populated parts of the Midwest even sought to attract foreigners. The Wisconsin State Emigrant Agency opened in New York in 1852 to publicize the state as a land of opportunity. As voting rights came within the purview of the states, the 1848 Wisconsin constitution gave alien men the right to vote once they had declared intent to naturalize. Indiana in 1850 permitted alien men to vote a year after declaring their intent, and Minnesota in 1857 mandated just six months residence before alien men could vote. A more fluid social situation meant that, in the words of historian Lawrence J. McCaffrey, “the Irish in the Midwest were less physically and psychologically ghettoized than in the East,” and accordingly, “tended to be more liberal and less paranoid in their religion and politics.” Nonetheless, historian Kerby Miller found that, notwithstanding regional variation, Irish immigrants remained clustered in the lowest-paying and least skilled jobs and experienced a disproportionately low quality of life whether in large urban centers such as Boston or New York, smaller industrial towns such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, or Poughkeepsie, New York, or mid-sized cities in the Midwest such as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or South Bend, Indiana. Nativism was pervasive, and even in less-prejudiced Chicago, the Tribune scorned Catholicism as a fatal hindrance to becoming fully American.9

Know-Nothings and the Crisis of the 1850s

The turbulence of the 1850s led to the development of the Know Nothing Party, which engaged with issues of slavery, race, ethnicity, religion, and American identity. In the North, Know Nothings capitalized on a growing antislavery movement after the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in 1854 radicalized sectional tensions, and by the end of that year, the party claimed more than a million members. While fighting the extension of slavery was important to Know Nothings in the North, the party also embodied the potent nativist impulse that existed in America in the 1850s. Many Know Nothings believed that, unlike earlier immigrants, more recent arrivals in America did not wish to assimilate or embrace American values. At its heart, Know Nothingism promoted the ideas that Protestantism defined and embodied American and republican values, Catholicism and immigrants directly threatened these tenets, Catholics and immigrants wielded disproportionate political power, and political parties had become corrupt, especially because politicians courted immigrants for their votes. The Know Nothing Party urged restrictions on liquor and slavery, though not necessarily equal rights for blacks. In 1855, Know Nothings controlled both the governorship and legislature of Massachusetts (where every senator and all but three of 378 representatives in its State House was a Know Nothing), Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. Know Nothings captured the governor’s office in Pennsylvania and held a majority in that state’s House, likely held a majority of Indiana’s and Maine’s legislatures, and took a third of New York’s legislature and a minority flank in Michigan’s legislature. By the end of 1855, Know Nothings had elected eight governors, more than a hundred U.S. congressmen, the mayors of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and filled thousands of local offices.10

The Know Nothing Party accomplished a number of its legislative objectives, at least at the state level, before it gave way to the Republicans. Massachusetts’s nativist legislature was representative of the social and cultural struggle against immigrants when it sought to keep Catholic children in public schools imbued with Protestant culture: it mandated reading from the Protestant Bible and prohibited the teaching of foreign languages in its public schools. That same legislature approved a constitutional amendment forbidding the use of state funds to assist sectarian schools. In Massachusetts and Maryland, lingering innuendo of sexual lasciviousness by priests led Know Nothing committees to conduct surprise inspections of Catholic convents and schools, scaring both sisters and students alike. Assaulting the church’s financial power, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, and Michigan nativists passed legislation requiring title to church property to pass from bishops to lay trustees.11

Know Nothings also acted to curtail the political power of recent immigrants. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine forbade state courts from participating in naturalization procedures in any way, and New Hampshire restricted its state judges, so that naturalization could take place only in the more limited number of federal courts in those states. Moreover, Know Nothings urged a probation period of between five and twenty-one years before immigrants could naturalize. While Congress did not act on such proposals, some states tried to accomplish the same effect. The 1855 Massachusetts legislature approved an amendment to that state’s constitution mandating a twenty-one-year period before any male naturalized citizen could vote, as well as complete prohibition from office for Catholics or immigrants. Technicalities caused by the amendment’s wording required the 1856 legislature to revise it, but the already waning power of the Know Nothings resulted in a reduction of the period from twenty-one to fourteen years. Moreover, because the Massachusetts constitution required a two-thirds vote in two consecutive legislatures before a proposed amendment could be sent to the people for ratification, the provision banning Catholics or immigrants from holding office failed. In the end, the 1858 legislature, more Republican than Know Nothing, approved an amendment requiring a two-year period before naturalized male citizens could vote or hold office. An 1859 statewide election ratified the measure by a vote of 21,119 to 15,398.12

The issue of slavery divided the party on a national level. Know Nothings in the North generally elected antislavery U.S. senators and opposed admission of additional slave states. Several Northern state legislatures dominated by the party also enacted “personal liberty laws,” designed to hamper enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. On the other hand, antislavery sentiment did not translate into a platform of equal rights for blacks. Know Nothings rarely discussed rights even for free blacks, much less a more inclusive concept of citizenship that could incorporate them. Northern Know Nothings sought exclusion of immigrants and an end to slavery’s expansion but do not seem to have considered a more defined description of national citizenship as a way to achieve either goal. Instead, Know Nothings continued to look to the states to determine the rights enjoyed by immigrants and blacks.13

Irish American antipathy toward abolitionism enflamed Know Nothings in the North, and helped define their relations with blacks. The conditions in Ireland from which many of them fled hardened Irish American attitudes toward African Americans. After describing a state of affairs in Ireland that “swept millions…into the poorhouse, the ocean, and the grave,” Irish-born priest Daniel W. Cahill argued in 1861 that “the negro slaves of America are far happier than the poor Irish” and asked, “Who will therefore deny that the poor Irish cottier, at this moment in Ireland, with his life and death fairly in the hands and at the mercy of the cruel Landlord, is not in a worse condition and is really a more degraded slave, than the negroes of North America?”14

More immediate to their lives, the prospect of millions of freed slaves migrating north alarmed Irish American workers who viewed free African Americans as a threat to their jobs and tenuous social position. This tension created a virulent antiblack racism among Irish Americans. In turn, some blacks referred to Irish immigrants as “white niggers,” who displaced free African Americans from the job market in Northern cities. Adding to the mix, some abolitionists embraced nativism after taking notice of the Irish American community’s proslavery stance, and this mutually reinforced antagonism among the parties. As early as 1839, Boston’s Irish Catholic newspaper, the Pilot, identified abolitionists as “bigoted and persecuting religionists…[desiring] the extermination of Catholics by fire and sword.” Abolitionist characterizations of the Constitution, such as William Lloyd Garrison’s declaration that it signified a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” horrified Irish Americans who honored the founding charter and rights it protected. From the other side, John Mitchel, an Irish-born apologist for the South, repulsed some native-born Americans who initially sympathized with the plight of the Irish when he announced in 1854, “We deny that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, or to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion…and as for being a particular in the wrongs, we, for our part, wish we had a good plantation, well stocked with healthy Negroes in Alabama.”15

On the other hand, even where many of them held nativist sentiments, some abolitionists and blacks rejected the Know Nothing Party on ideological grounds, or viewed debate about immigrants as a diversion from combating slavery. Black abolitionist William J. Watkins in 1855 stated that Know Nothingism “burrows amid the murky shadows of the grossest ignorance,” while that same year, George W. Julian, a former Free-Soil congressman who would return to Congress in 1861 as a Republican, deemed Know Nothingism as “radically vicious in spirit” because it “tramples down the doctrine of human brotherhood,” and “judges men by the accidents of their condition instead of striving to find a common lot for all with a common access to the blessings of life.” Frederick Douglass’ Paper noted that national aspirations would force Know Nothings in the North to suppress antislavery candidates for fear of offending Southerners and, later that year, it lamented the defeat of the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts by a Know Nothing. According to the paper, “We have reason to believe that had the question of Human Freedom been the only and the real issue presented,” instead of the “bait” of anti-foreign sentiment, the Republican would have prevailed. Going further, the abolitionist newspaper the National Era criticized Know Nothing strictures against the foreign-born as a matter of principle and as a distraction to abolitionism, but also because they drove some antislavery immigrants to vote for the Democratic Party so as to “rebuke” this “proscriptive spirit.”16

African American and Irish American Reactions to Exclusion

Although little direct dialogue existed between Northern African Americans and Irish Americans in the years between the Mexican and Civil Wars, many members of both groups argued for the integration of their respective communities into the United States. Some Irish Americans and African Americans relied on their histories in America to respond to strictures against them, while others focused their concern on liberating Ireland or creating a separate black nation, respectively, at least in part to promote their calls for respect in the United States. The contentions African American and Irish American leaders articulated in the 1850s, as well as the internal debates that took place within both groups, helped frame the claims they would assert during the 1860s.

Boston-born black historian William Cooper Nell and other African Americans in the mid-nineteenth-century North repeatedly cited black military participation in the American Founding to bolster their claims to inclusion and equal rights. For blacks, the Revolution exemplified a bitter paradox of antebellum American freedom: African Americans participated in it only to find the memory of their service subsumed by continued racial prejudice, and the history of their allegiance ignored by those who defined the United States as a white republic. According to black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond in 1857, blacks enjoyed “the right of American citizenship” only for as long as “the patriotic services of colored men in the defence of the country were fresh in the minds of the people.”17

Nell thus sought, in his Services of Colored Americans, in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (1851) and The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855), to restore the contribution of blacks to the American Founding to the record of the early Republic. Nell argued that the participation of blacks during the Revolution and War of 1812 warranted their equal inclusion in the American people. Antebellum black conventions and petitions frequently cited Nell’s research. Black abolitionist William Howard Day, himself the son of a naval veteran of the War of 1812, responded to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act by organizing an 1852 memorial for black veterans from earlier wars. In front of an audience of five hundred, including eight African American veterans from the War of 1812, Day delivered a searing critique that unequal treatment of blacks exposed the failed potential of the Declaration of Independence.18

Some whites used Nell’s historical point to strengthen their arguments that blacks could be citizens. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis analyzed black rights during the early history of the Republic to bolster his dissent refuting Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Dred Scott opinion, and in 1861, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison published The Loyalty and Devotion of Colored Americans in the Revolution and War of 1812. Meanwhile, Nell organized a March 5, 1858, commemoration of the Boston Massacre at Faneuil Hall, near the spot of the incident. There, black and white abolitionists spoke out against Dred Scott, and the ceremony offered tangible displays of black military participation in American history, such as Crispus Attucks’s powder horn, and elderly Brazillai Lew, a veteran of Bunker Hill.19

Irish Americans similarly turned to history to affirm their inclusion in American society, while they wrestled at the same time with their own loyalty to Ireland and the United States. William James MacNeven, an Irish-born physician who arrived in New York on July 4, 1805, explored this paradox in his book, Pieces of Irish History (1807). MacNeven equated British tyranny against the United States and Ireland, and he argued that resistance by either nation benefited both of them. Subsequent Irish American leaders and editors in the 1840s and 1850s continued to assert this connection to promote assimilation. These spokesmen claimed, in a merger of interests that historian Kerby Miller described as “contrived,” that by loving Ireland and struggling for her liberation, Irish Americans helped to protect universal republican principles worldwide and, in the process, deepened their devotion to the United States. Irish nationalists in America, such as Thomas F. Meagher, contended that affection for Ireland was “natural” but also “compatible with all the duties and liabilities the oath of [American] citizenship provides and sanctifies.” On the other hand, an editorial in the Irish American in June 1850 emphasized the need for Irish immigrants to become “true Americans in heart and soul.” In mid-1854, New England intellectual Orestes Brownson, who turned from his Protestant upbringing to convert to Catholicism in 1844, promoted that religion but also urged foreign-born Catholics to slough off characteristics not native to the United States. Brownson urged Irish Americans not to form separate militia companies, presses, or maintain an ethnic culture.20

Irish nationalism in America, meanwhile, did not exist simply as a transplant from across the Atlantic. Instead, the Irish nationalist movement in the United States at this time developed in direct response to the alienation many immigrants felt in a foreign land, as well as their sense of loss of their past lives and longing for their Irish heritage. In this transitional period converged their feelings of suffering before immigration, anger at Ireland’s increasing squalor, and isolation in America borne of nativism. As Kerby Miller noted, “Ethnic self-consciousness was largely a reaction to American disadvantages” but also to “personal sufferings” which, after some “time and distance” had passed, could be translated into nationalist terms. Maintaining their cultural traditions and interest in Irish affairs provided immigrants with a support and social network in the face of the jarring experience of relocating to a new land. Further, the Irish nationalist movement in the United States acted under the assumption that Ireland’s humiliation supported American nativism and that elevating Ireland to her place among the nations of the world would generate respect for Irish Americans here. In the late 1850s, the Irish News in New York argued that only after Ireland’s restoration as a nation would her “children [be] honored or respected,” and the Phoenix asserted that only then could Irish immigrants face native-born Americans “without being inflamed with feelings of…shame.”21

A parallel debate took place among Northern blacks. Some African Americans supported separation from white society and the concept of black nationalism, while others advocated integration and emphasized an American identity for blacks. Both these flanks of the black community used different language to argue the same point: that African Americans had the capacity and the right to be treated as equals. Before the war, leaders as diverse as Martin Delaney and Frederick Douglass sought to reclaim African American civilization as a counter to racism and believed that restoring African accomplishments to the rolls of history could puncture the myth of black inferiority on which white prejudice relied. Douglass and integrationists such as Nell focused on blacks’ American identity, however, and while they called for self-help within the United States, they also claimed automatic inclusion as part of the American people as a result of their American birth, historical contributions, and civic participation. Other blacks, such as Delaney, responded to exclusion and conditions in America by seeking to form a separate black state and, in that way, expose the economic and moral folly of slavery and prejudice by proving black capacity for production and self-government.22

Military Service in the 1850s

The question of whether Irish Americans or free African Americans should serve in the armed forces became particularly prominent during the 1850s. This issue not only foreshadowed events to come during the Civil War, it served as a juncture between the pragmatic realities that loomed as sectional tension, and debate over who could be included within the American people, intensified during that decade. Blacks faced exclusion from the army pursuant to War Department regulations promulgated in 1820 and 1821, and state militias similarly barred their service, although the navy allowed blacks to join in numbers equal to 5 percent of white enlistments. Blacks did not serve in the army during the Mexican War, although about a thousand of them helped man naval vessels during the conflict. Blacks generally opposed that war, viewing any land gained from it as theft from Mexico that helped the slave power.23

Northern blacks opposed their exclusion from military service, which comprised a visible and public display of citizenship, and integrationists used the issue to engage further in the debate about American citizenship during the 1850s. In 1852, several resolute blacks, including attorney Robert Morris and abolitionist William J. Watkins, sought a charter to form an African American militia company in Boston. In addressing the Massachusetts legislature’s militia committee on February 24, 1853, Watkins actively contested the exclusion of blacks from participating in this form of citizenship rights. “Regard us…as men,” Watkins demanded, “who, knowing our rights, dare, at all hazards, to maintain them.” Watkins avowed, “We are entitled to ALL the rights and immunities of CITIZENS OF MASSACHUSETTS,” as “law-abiding, tax-paying, liberty-loving, NATIVE-BORN, AMERICAN CITIZENS,” and he challenged Massachusetts to “carry out the principles of your immortal declaration,” which triumphed, Watkins reminded the legislators, in part because of black blood spilled in the Revolution and War of 1812. Despite Massachusetts’s progressive reputation on racial issues, however, the committee took no further action on the petition. By 1855, Boston blacks formed the Massasoit Guard without state approval.24

Irish Americans, on the other hand, served at all times in the American army, but their participation in the Mexican War complicated their calls for inclusion. Some Protestants argued that Catholicism infected Mexico and made it weak. Irish Americans, meanwhile, asserted that their volunteering to fight in the war evinced loyalty to the United States, notwithstanding their religion. Adding to the mix, some Mexican wartime propaganda questioned the loyalty of Irish Catholics to the United States, or directly asked them how they could fight alongside Protestants in destroying a Catholic country. A band of Catholic American deserters, the San Patricio battalion, provided nativists with a more potent example with which to stain Irish American Catholic soldiers as untrustworthy and disloyal. The members of the battalion deserted for a number of reasons, including harsh disciplinary conditions in the army, the nativist treatment they faced, and the anti-Catholicism they witnessed. Even though not all of its members were Irish Americans, a green flag with the Mexican coat of arms on one side and the figure of St. Patrick on the other, gave the battalion a distinctly Irish American identity.25

A few years later, the eagerness displayed by some Irish American militia companies in helping to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act energized the abolitionist-nativist connection, generated further tension between Irish Americans and African Americans, and led some states to curb Irish American militia service. Some ethnic leaders had emphasized enrollment in state militias as a way to integrate into the United States, as well as the highest form of service Irish Americans could provide to their new country. Accordingly, strictures against Irish American militia companies cut exceptionally deep, especially when inspired by nativism and abolitionism. Officials mobilized the militia after the apprehension of runaway slave Anthony Burns in Boston in May 1854, to prevent a mob from blocking Burns’s return. Although many native-born militiamen declined to participate, several Irish American units did. A letter in the Liberator later protested, “Irishmen, instead of shedding the tear of pity [for Burns], hardened their hearts, and did the business of the oppressor,” while another periodical noted, “Where there is base, vile work to be done for slavery, there is your Irish Catholic…ready for business.” Eager to limit Irish American participation in civic life anyway, the Know Nothing governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut, Henry J. Gardner and William T. Minor, respectively, disbanded the Irish American militia units in their states. Maine limited the number of immigrants permitted in its militia companies to one-third, and New York disbanded its Irish American Ninth New York State Militia (NYSM) from May 1858 until June 1859 (the Ninth NYSM later served during the Civil War as the core of the Eighty-third New York Infantry).26

The controversy over African American and Irish American military service became more pronounced as sectional tension heightened during the 1850s. After John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Massachusetts’s legislature advised repealing the exclusion of blacks from the Bay State’s militia but opposition, including from Democratic militia general Benjamin Butler, caused Republican governor Nathaniel P. Banks to veto the measure. Butler and Banks both later commanded black troops during the Civil War, with Butler showing considerably more enthusiasm than the ex-governor. As to Irish Americans, “We hear on all sides the sound of disunion,” ethnic leader John C. Tucker cautioned in Massachusetts in 1859. “God forbid that I should live to see the day, but supposing it should come…can Massachusetts…expect that these men, whom she is now about to proscribe, will rush to her assistance? Do you suppose that I would rush to the standard of the State that would put that ignominious mark of political disability and inferiority upon me?”27

The actions of Irish Americans themselves in the militia also revealed the uncertain position they held in the antebellum United States. While the native-born debated the level of commitment Irish Americans showed to their new country, persistent loyalty to their native land complicated the issue of allegiance for the Irish in America. Weeks before Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, the Irish American Sixty-ninth NYSM celebrated its refusal to parade during an October 1860 visit of the Prince of Wales to the United States. Citing a law that limited the yearly number of parades in which a militia unit had to participate, and ignoring a conflicting law that allowed militia generals to exercise the powers conferred by rank, Colonel Michael Corcoran claimed that his regiment had already satisfied its annual duty. On the evening of March 15, 1861, the uniformed militiamen marched to the festive strains of Irish music into a hall packed with observers and accepted a green silk flag bearing the Irish sunburst in gold.28

Thomas F. Meagher delivered the night’s keynote address. Deftly using his Irish wit, Meagher turned the meaning of New York’s extravagant celebration on its head, noting that the “conqueror can always afford to be munificent to the conquered,” and bragging how the prince witnessed the prosperity and freedom of a republic wrested from his ancestors. Meagher acknowledged that Irish Americans had to refrain from the pageant because joining it would have exposed them to charges that they had forgotten the sufferings of their native Ireland. On the other hand, Meagher claimed that Corcoran’s refusal to participate would have been a “grievous” breach of military discipline but for (Corcoran’s interpretation of) the law. Meagher asserted to his cheering audience that, had the law required Corcoran to do so, he would have paraded the regiment in “submission to the law of the Republic,” because acquitting oneself as a “faithful citizen…strengthened…the claims of Ireland to the good will, the advocacy and recognition of America.”29

While the militiamen wrestled with their dual loyalties, some native-born Americans viewed the Sixty-ninth NYSM’s refusal to parade as proof that the Irish in America held a foreign allegiance and could not assimilate or become good citizens of the Republic. In New York City, both Irish Americans and native-born Americans closely followed newspaper coverage of Corcoran’s court-martial for disobeying orders, including defenses that relied on Corcoran’s Irish heritage. A larger event disrupted the proceedings, however, and led to dismissal of the charges against Corcoran: the shelling of Fort Sumter.30

Conclusion

As immigrants and as Catholics, Irish Americans lived under a certain level of exclusion that prewar nativism tried to maintain, institutionalize, and intensify. Even as Know Nothing power changed into Republican power, and the grander anti-immigrant ambitions of the party were thwarted, legal and social challenges to immigrants showed the tenuous status of naturalized citizens.

African Americans confronted even more difficult conditions: slavery in the South and legal strictures and private acts of prejudice in the North. Irish Americans did not face the same legal and social conditions that blacks confronted, and great tension existed between these two groups because they shared the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Yet, while Irish Americans likely paid little mind to African American discussions, and vice versa, striking echoes nevertheless exist in terms of how both groups reacted to exclusionary forces during the 1850s. Moreover, debates among the native born concerning the rights and status of both groups highlight the contested and undefined nature of national citizenship as the nation reeled toward Civil War.