Author: Lina Mohamed

Racial differentiation was established in America for a long time. This made it very difficult for non-Americans to adapt to society when they were not accepted. Problems between different religions made it even harder because Americans were extremely non accepting of Catholics and denied citizenship to Catholics. Irish immigrants were mainly white and they used their “whiteness” to an advantage by holding themselves above African Americans and Chinese people. On the other hand, the poor and ugly Irish immigrants did not have this advantage and because of this, they were compared to African Americans and apes.

Irish natives lived on potatoes and when the famine took over, many died but more of them moved to the United States for survival. Thomas Carlyle was a essayist in Victorian England and he was extremely influential in his writing. He wrote a lot about the Irish and made harsh comments about them such as describing Ireland “a human dog kennel”. Carlyle turned the Irish into animals into his writings and similarly, Charles Kingsley called them “white chimpanzees”. Stories were published to degrade Catholicism and the churches were depicted as “sexually immoral”. Soon this hatred was seen everywhere; in newspapers, books, magazines and this caused anti-Catholic hatred to increase as it became a widespread theme. This made the Irish immigrants and their situations even more desperate.

The U.S. census of 1850 declared the number of immigrants and Irish immigrants were a huge amount, 961,719. This huge amount did not mean anything because the Irish were still treated horribly and were continuously ridiculed in cartoons, jokes, and essays. Cartoons, especially, enforced certain stereotypes about Irish. These stereotypes emphasized that the Irish were often apelike, always poor, ugly, drunken, violent, superstitious, etc. Parallels continued to be formed between the Irishmen to the Negro. “In 1876, for instance, Nast pictured stereotypical southern freedmen and northern Irishmen as equally unsuited for the vote during Reconstruction after the American Civil War.” Irish soon, turned on the African Americans in rejection of this widely spread Black-Irish likeness.

Religion was more important in Britain and Ireland than the United States. Religious wars were fought in England for a long time but United States had no wars fought over religion.However, around 1844, violence was on this rise against the Irish as their residences and Catholic churches were burned down. Riots related to these fires lasted three days and killed thirteen people and wounding fifty. Most of these violent crimes against Catholics were unorganized and unplanned. Mob violence grew worse and one mob almost killed a priest in Maine. The “Know-Nothings” continued to oppose political corruption and kept Catholic immigrants their main targets.

A bill was soon put out to ban people who were not born in the United States to hold political office and to extend the naturalization period. These preventions prevented many working class men to vote which was the goal of the Know-Nothings. Ulysses S. Grant intended to control all Jews in Tennessee no matter who they were. However, President Lincoln quickly overruled this order but not before families had already been dislocated.

Eventually, the “political tensions” destroyed the Know-nothingism as slavery. Slavery issues split this groups’s movement but they later rejoined the Democrats. This split did not mean much because they intended to continue their mission and nativism. Eventually, the worst part of this violence and hatred associated with the Catholics in the United States ended but ended slowly. However, Irish Catholics did remain “a race apart- Celts”. The Celt and African remained two inferior races for a long time but “at least the Celts had their whiteness”.