For many Americans during the 1800s, religious hatred against the Irish Catholics was on par with the racist feelings towards the African Americans. Poor Irish Catholics, also known as Celts, who immigrated to America were seen as racially different from Protestant white Americans or Anglo-Saxon English enough so to be oppressed and even compared to apes.
Anti-Catholic feelings started in England during the reigns of protestants Henry VIII in the mid-sixteenth century and Oliver Cromwell during the mid-seventeenth century English Civil War against Charles I. The British believed that the Irish had been set up for failure ever since their beginnings and were unfit for self-government. The anti-Catholic rulings that had been put forth in England were transported to the American colonies making it illegal to practice the Roman Catholic religion. After America was freed from the rulings of England, states like New York still wouldn’t allow, “citizenship to Catholics unless they renounced allegiance to the pope in all matters, political or religious” (133).
During the 1830s and 1840s, Ireland’s potato famine became a “perverse tourist attraction” (133) where intellectuals like Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, and Thomas Carlyle went to see the true horrors of it all. After Beaumont’s visit, he found that, “the history of the poor is the history of Ireland” (134). Carlyle concluded that the Celts and the African Americans, “lacked the vision as well as the spunk needed to add value to the world” (135). The poor Irish were seen as so low that intermarriage between a Saxon and a Celt would be against natural law.
Due to rising crisis in Ireland, many Irish immigrated to America. In fact, the U.S. census of 1850 deemed that 961,719 immigrants came from Ireland. Protestant Americans were so appalled by the influx of Irish Catholic immigrants to America that they accused Europeans of purposely sending the Catholics over to corrupt the Protestant virtues of American democracy. Anti-Catholic hatred soared with more than 270 books, 25 newspapers, and 13 magazines being published between the years 1830 and 1860.
Racism against the Irish was personified by the character “Paddy.” Paddy was a drunk, violent, lazy, poor, and ugly person that most Americans saw the Irish as. The Paddy stereotype was frequently drawn in political cartoons in a bad light by famous artists such as Thomas Nast. The hatred for the Irish Catholics didn’t stop there. Even though the Irish are definitely white, they were completely expelled from the Caucasian race by some and seen as being just a different from white people as the Africans were seen as at the time.
Many abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Catholic emancipationists like Daniel O’Connell, “saw the needs of the starving Irish and enslaved blacks as analogous” (143). Both groups agreed that, “the tragedy of both peoples lay in oppression. Neither horror stemmed from weakness rooted in race” (143). Although sympathies for black and Irish people were alike, the Irish in the United States rejected the similarity. In hopes to become a higher status on the white side, the Irish voted for the proslavery Democratic Party and even attacked African Americans during the 1863 draft riots.
Rising nativism in America spurred the nativists to start the Know-Nothing Party. They burned Catholic churches and created voter literacy tests to lower immigrant Democratic voting power. In addition to hating Catholics, they also opposed liquor consumption and political corruption. During the fall elections of 1854, many Know-Nothing members were voted into office. Soon after, a bill was introduced banning people not born in the United States from holding political office and to extend the waiting period for naturalization to twenty-one years. Luckily, this bill failed to become a law and the working class was still able to vote.
With the election of Grover Cleveland in 1884, violent anti-Catholic acts were slowly coming to an end but poor Irish Catholics still remained one of the inferior races in America. As the first alien immigrant wave to America, the Irish carved the path for change to the outdated idea that the American was the Saxon.
