IRISH AND GERMAN NEWCOMERS

To everyone discontented in Europe, commented the New York Times, “thoughts come of the New Free World.” America’s political and religious freedoms attracted Europeans who chafed under the continent’s repressive governments and rigid social hierarchies, including political refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848. “In America,” wrote a German newcomer, “there aren’t any masters, here everyone is a free agent.”

Table 9.2 TOTAL NUMBER OF IMMIGRANTS BY FIVE-YEAR PERIOD

The largest number of immigrants, however, were refugees from disaster— Irish men and women fleeing the Great Famine of 1845-1851, when a blight destroyed the potato crop on which the island’s diet rested. An estimated 1 million persons starved to death and another million emigrated in those years, most of them to the United States. Lacking industrial skills and capital, these impoverished agricultural laborers and small farmers ended up filling the low-wage unskilled jobs native-born Americans sought to avoid. Male Irish immigrants built America’s railroads, dug canals, and worked as common laborers, servants, longshoremen, and factory operatives. Irish women frequently went to work as servants in the homes of native-born Americans, although some preferred factory work to domestic service. “It’s the freedom that we want when the day’s work is done,” one Irish woman explained. “Our day is ten hours long, but when it’s done it’s done”; however, servants were on call at anytime. By the end of the 1850s, the Lowell textile mills had largely replaced Yankee farm women with immigrant Irish families. Four-fifths of Irish immigrants remained in the Northeast. In Boston, New York, and smaller industrial cities, they congregated in overcrowded urban ghettos notorious for poverty, crime, and disease.

The second-largest group of immigrants, Germans, included a considerably larger number of skilled craftsmen than the Irish. Germans also settled in tightly knit neighborhoods in eastern cities, but many were able to move to the West, where they established themselves as craftsmen, shopkeepers, and farmers. The “German triangle,” as the cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee were sometimes called, all attracted large German populations. A vibrant German-language culture, with its own schools, newspapers, associations, and churches, developed wherever large numbers of Germans settled. “As one passes along the Bowery,” one observer noted of a part of New York City known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), “almost everything is German.”

Although our image of the West emphasizes the lone pioneer, many migrants settled in tightly knit communities and worked cooperatively. This painting by Olof Krans, who came to the United States from Sweden with his family in 1850 at the age of twelve, shows a group of women preparing to plant corn at the immigrant settlement of Bishop Hill, Illinois.

Figure 9.1 SOURCES OF IMMIGRATION, 1850

Some 40,000 Scandinavians also emigrated to the United States in these years, most of whom settled on farms in the Old Northwest. The continuing expansion of industry and the failure of the Chartist movement of the 1840s, which sought to democratize the system of government in Britain, also inspired many English workers to emigrate to the United States.