Although many Americans today may find it difficult to understand earlier American hatred towards white Irish Catholics than the racial hatred expressed towards African slaves, religious hatred such as that of Protestants towards Catholics supposedly existed earlier, lasted longer, and killed more people than racial hatred and bigotry. Indeed, there were other white people, most notably Irish Catholics, who were considered inferior by the majority of Americans and thereby mistreated and stigmatized.
Anti-Catholicism has been a part of American history since before it was even a sovereign nation; anti-Catholic laws existed even in the pre-Revolutionary era, when America consisted of just a few British colonies. Religious contempt toward the Irish surged in the mid-nineteenth century, when the devastating potato famine caused greater numbers of Irish to immigrate to the United States than ever. Consequently, several anti-Catholic publications and groups established themselves in the northeast. Countless Catholic churches were burned throughout New England and the Midwest. Protestants perpetuated the view of the Catholic church as sexually immoral through popular books like Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. In addition, Protestant Americans feared that the great numbers of Catholics pouring into the country would destroy democracy and cause a nationwide conversion to “Popery,” (Painter 136).
Despite the broader scale of religious hatred and violence in the United States, American society remained rooted in ideas of racial difference and color hierarchy. Race was applied to Irish immigrants with nearly the same frequency and prejudice as their religion. Due to their racial status as Celts, many native-born Americans viewed the Irish as a separate race inferior to the Anglo-Saxon English. They were even referred to as “white chimpanzees” (Painter 135). Masses of American writers and cartoonists emphasized this racial aspect of the Irish by depicting them as apelike, ugly, violent, ignorant, drunken, lazy, and filthy sub-human people, which ultimately enforced and reinforced the Paddy stereotype of the Irish. Paddy jokes became a constant source of amusement for the “better classes” in American society.
During this era in history, many people, both patronizing Irish sympathizers and vehement nativist haters of the Irish, equated and compared the Irish to African slaves. Undoubtedly, both Irish immigrants and enslaved Africans were considered racially other and inferior in relation to Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent. The destitution, starvation, and poverty that the Irish experienced in the midst of the potato blight reminded many American intellectuals who visited Ireland at this time of the unspeakable suffering of African slaves in the U.S. “American visual culture” (Painter 142) in the form of cartoons and the like also equated the Irish Paddy with the “Negro.” Despite the similarities between these two groups, Irish immigrants themselves violently rejected these comparisons and tried to use the color lines present in American society to elevate themselves over black people by supporting the pro-slavery Democratic Party.
The combined status of the Irish as Catholic Celts, hated both for their religious differences as well as for their racial otherness, spurred mob violence at the hands of groups like the Know-Nothings, who soon acquired great political power for their anti-Catholic position, and the Order of United Americans. As slavery became a more pressing issue, however, Know-Nothingism lost most of its influence.
