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Gathering Antipathy: Irish Immigrants and Race in America’s Age of Emancipation

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Rethinking the Irish Diaspora

Part of the book series: Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship ((MDC))

Abstract

Recent attempts by the Irish government to assert the prominence of famine-era Irish immigrants in the cause of US slave emancipation obscure a more uneven, problematic record marked, at times, by intense antipathy towards slaves and free blacks. Focusing on the late antebellum and wartime urban North, this chapter attempts to ground this complicated record in the social, economic and cultural marginalisation of the famine-era diaspora in the United States. Departing from an influential recent literature generated by “critical whiteness studies”, the author argues that to the extent these immigrants consciously embraced “white racial identity”, their options had been severely circumscribed both by the difficult material circumstances they confronted and by their alienation from the main currents of the mid-nineteenth-century social reform, and particularly from the cause of abolition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Marese McDonagh, “Taoiseach heckled by anti-war charge protestors in Sligo”, Irish Times, 9 May 2015, at: http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/taoiseach-heckled-by-anti-water-charge-protesters-in-sligo-1.2206756; Harry Keaney, “Sligo pol envisions Ballymote as American as apple pie”, Irish Echo, 2 April 2002, at: http://irishecho.com/2011/02/sligo-pol-envisions-ballymote-as-american-as-apple-pie-2/ (both accessed 1 August 2016).

  2. 2.

    Niall O’Dowd, “Shame on protestors who disrupted Irish in US Civil War memorial”, Irish Central, 12 May 2015, at: http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/niallodowd/Shame-on-protesters-who-disrupted-Irish-in-US-Civil-War-memorial-.html (accessed 1 August 2016).

  3. 3.

    Estimates of the number of Irish recruits in the Confederate military vary widely. John Mitchell probably exaggerated in claiming that 40,000 served. David Gleeson (2001: 154) estimates that a conservative calculation would show “that around 70 per cent of able-bodied Irish men [in the South] served in the Confederate ranks.”

  4. 4.

    Freeman to Rev. N. Pinder, 24 March 1882; Freeman to Rev. N. Pinder, 6 Nov 1881; Freeman to F. H. Dickinson, Esq., 4 Dec. 1881.

  5. 5.

    Communication of Dr Henry G. Clark, City of Boston Documents, 1861.

  6. 6.

    Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, 27 March 1846; reprinted in Foner (1950).

  7. 7.

    William Lloyd Garrison and others had, of course, levelled the same criticisms at Protestant denominations in the North, and the white evangelical South was by mid-century thoroughly proslavery (see McKivigan 1984; Irons 2008).

  8. 8.

    Boston Pilot, 1 April 1862.

  9. 9.

    Boston Pilot, 1 April 1862.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Brian Kelly

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences, Ulster University, Belfast, United Kingdom

    Johanne Devlin Trew

  2. School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom

    Michael Pierse

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Kelly, B. (2018). Gathering Antipathy: Irish Immigrants and Race in America’s Age of Emancipation. In: Devlin Trew, J., Pierse, M. (eds) Rethinking the Irish Diaspora. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40784-5_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40784-5_7

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