American Immigration

Most were English, but many were Irish or Scottish, along with a few Germans. They worked as house servants, apprentices to artisans, but most were the hands and backs to work the nation’s growing farms of wheat, corn and tobacco.

This generation of immigrant did momentous work, but did nothing to upset the established Anglo-Saxon culture; indeed, it reinforced that culture by creating a working class to serve the upper classes, just as existed in England.

Colonial America and the early United States depended upon immigration -- and not only the grisly immigration of Africans -- but of thousands of white European immigrants who came to America as “indentured servants” to provide the labor for colonies and a nation growing at an incredible pace.

The First Wave

In 1820, 8,385 people emigrated to the US (6,000 from the British Isles). In 1854, the peak of the ‘first wave’ reached more than 427,000 (half from Germany, one quarter from Ireland).

The Potato Famine

Failure of the potato crop in 1845 began a series of bad harvests that drove many peasant farmers of Catholic, southern Ireland toward starvation. Unable to pay rents, many were driven to live in hillside burrows or to rely heavily upon British charitable organizations for survival.

The response of thousands of Irish was to leave their hungry country, give up on farming, and travel to Britain or the United States to seek jobs in the booming textile mills, railroads, and mines.

The overcrowded ships became known as “Coffin Ships”

Unlike the indentured servants of the colonial era, the Irish were not called for in the America.

And unlike those indentured servants, the Irish often came with entire families; this changed the character of immigration to the United States, as many mouths to feed meant a willingness to work at any job whatever.

So, the Irish became the “diggers” of a nation busy carving the earth, creating canals, railroads and mines.

Between 1846 and 1854, more than 1,300,000 Irish came to America. This represents one half of all US immigration.

Their poverty forced the Irish to rent in the meanest neighborhoods of the eastern cities. The tenement rowhouse was the typical dwelling. Overcrowded and poorly ventilated, the tenement would be the first home for many immigrants for many generation.

The Irish, forced by poverty to live in tight, noisy quarters, to raise livestock in the backyard, to leave their children alone while all adults worked, were seen by the Anglo-Saxon population as dirty, lazy and uncivilized.

Anglo-Saxon Americans appreciated the labor of the Irish, but were suspicious of the Roman Catholic church, concerned about the Irish penchant for games and relaxation in their off hours, and condemning of the Irish love of drinking and riotous behavior.

A stereotypical view of the Irish arose of a dull witted drunk, more interested in beating heads than in becoming useful American citizens.

The first group to endure strong nativist sentiment was the Irish.

Condemnation of drunkenness

Fears of Catholicism

Condemnation of gang violence

Discrimination and fears over competition for jobs

Past Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the Irish combined with the strange features of their lives (Catholicism, open use of alcohol, urban living and poverty) to mark them as weak, ignorant and unfit for the blessings of the United States.

As the Irish, even in the face of discrimination, worked to build the nation and gradually become economic and political successes, the anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States grew.

The American Party, called the “Know Nothings”, ran former president Millard Fillmore on an anti-immigration platform in the 1856 presidential election.

Thomas Nast, himself an immigrant, used his position of influence as the cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly to warn Americans about the dangers of the Catholic Church and the evils of Irish dominated political machines such as the Tammany Hall Democratic machine of “Boss” William Tweed.

As the number of foreign born in the United States increased, Anglo-Saxon America came to distrust the democratic process, fearing, somewhat validly, that the immigrant vote was controlled by corrupt political machines.

In part, the Progressive Era reforms on American democracy were inspired by an anti-immigrant impulse as much as a desire for fair democracy in the United States.

German Immigration

Beginning in 1840’s, desperate German émigrés fled revolution and destruction in their homeland. Between 1846 and 1855 more than 970,000 came to America.

Like the Irish, German immigrants came to the United States under severe stress and often came with entire families.

Unlike the Irish, many Germans had money with which to purchase land and a will to farm. The Germans became vital to the effort to pioneer the eastern prairie of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska.

Germans brought parts of their culture with them (language, Lutheranism, educational systems) and had a major impact in the United States, especially in western cities. The enjoyment of alcohol, fun-filled sabbath days, and joyous celebration of Christmas were held against the Germans by the more Puritan inspired Anglo-Saxons.

German immigrant, Thomas Nast, created the traditional image of ‘Santa Claus’

Chinese farmers

China in the 19th century was a land of past greatness, with a mass of poor peasants and a small group of wealthy merchants and nobility.

China had lost the initiative of world leadership in all areas and settled into a complacent isolation.

Beginning suddenly in 1854, with 13,000 arrivals, Chinese looked to America as an opportunity to earn the money needed to purchase land for a farm in China. Between 1854 and 1882, more than 200,000 emigrated.

Chinese immigration was unique as a “male only” affair.

In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty established less restrictive Chinese immigration.

Not all Americans were pleased.

The Chinese in the United States

The most different of immigrants

The Chinese built the Central Pacific Railroad.

Chinese frequently filled two roles in the towns of the American west: laundry service and keepers of the opium dens.

The Irish in America survived their era of discrimination and even flourished with political power in the nation’s largest cities. The Chinese were another story.

Their different looks and desire to remain separate from white society combined with the claims from white workers that the Chinese were driving down wages and taking away jobs to make the Chinese a target of discrimination and violence.

Even as the Chinese were the major force behind the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad and filling other important roles in the economy of the growing western United States, they were being harassed and made the focus of violent nativist agitation.

Even after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act ended large scale Chinese immigration, the Chinese suffered threats and violence, as in the 1886 Seattle riots.