The Irish and the Rise of Industrial Labor in Antebellum America
More than five million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1860. By the Civil War, nearly one out of every eight Americans had been born outside the United States.
Between 1820 and 1840, over 250,000 Irish immigrants arrived in the United States. Without the money or background required to purchase and operate farms, Irish immigrants settled primarily in northeastern cities and towns and performed unskilled work. Irish men usually emigrated alone and, when possible, practiced what became known as chain migration. Chain migration allowed Irish men to send portions of their wages home, which would then be used either to support their families in Ireland or to purchase tickets for relatives to come to the United States. Irish immigration followed this pattern into the 1840s and 1850s, when the Irish Famine sparked a massive exodus out of Ireland. Between 1840 and 1860, historians estimate around 1 million Irish died from starvation and 1.7 million Irish fled with perhaps 1 million coming to the United States.
The sudden influx of immigration triggered a backlash among many native-born Anglo-Protestant Americans. Newly arriving Irish labored in urban America’s dirtiest and most dangerous occupations, while facing discrimination throughout the nation. Encouraged by elite buisnessmen and U.S. policymakers, many working class U.S.-born whites blamed their economic insecurity on immigrant communities like the Irish and Chinese. This “nativist” movement, fearful of the growing Catholic presence, sought to limit immigration and prevent Catholics from establishing churches and other institutions. In Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities with large Catholic populations, widespread anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment targeted Irish newcomers with popular media depicting them as a threat to U.S. values. Irish workers were portrayed with apelike features in political cartoons that sterotyped these immigrants as lazy, dangerous and drunken. This discourse on Irish immigrants led to numerous violent incidents where U.S.-born whites attacked Irish Catholics, criminalizing their communities, burning down their churches, and even lynching Irish residents.
In industrial northern cities, Irish immigrants swelled the ranks of the working class and quickly encountered the politics of industrial labor. Many workers formed trade unions during the early republic. These unions worked to protect the economic power of their members by creating closed shops—workplaces wherein employers could only hire union members—and striking to improve working conditions. Political leaders denounced these organizations as unlawful because they challenged the authority and wealth of business leaders. Unions did not become legally acceptable until 1842 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of a union organized among Boston bootmakers, arguing that the workers were capable of acting “in such a manner as best to subserve their own interests.” Even after the case, unions remained in a precarious legal position.
While facing demeaning treatment from U.S.-born white workers, Irish immigrants also held the advantage of their skin color in assimilating into U.S. society. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited access to citizenship to “free white persons”. While this created a path to citizenship for Irish and other European immigrants, the law left Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese immigrants and at times Mexican-born residents without one.
Texas, Mexico and the United States
After gaining its independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico hoped to attract new settlers to its northern areas to create a buffer between it and the powerful Comanche. New immigrants, mostly from the southern United States, poured into the Mexican province Tejas. Despite relocating to Mexico, these U.S.-born immigrants continued to enslave Black people. Over the next twenty-five years, concerns over growing Anglo influence and the culture of white supremecy they brought with them produced great friction between Mexicans and U.S. settlers in the province of Tejas. In 1829, Mexico, hoping to quell both anger and immigration, outlawed slavery. U.S. immigrants, eager to expand their agricultural fortunes, largely ignored these requirements. In response, Mexican authorities closed their territory to any new immigration in 1830—a prohibition ignored by U.S. nationals who often illegally squatted on Mexican public lands.
Anglo-American Texan leaders declared independence on March 2, 1836. The Texas Revolution of 1835–1836 was a successful secessionist movement in the northern district of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas that resulted in an independent Republic of Texas. Mexican leader Santa Anna was captured following a surprise attack and compelled to sign the Treaty of Velasco on May 14, 1836, by which he agreed to withdraw his army from Texas and acknowledged Texas independence. Although a new Mexican government never recognized the Republic of Texas, the United States and several other nations gave the new country diplomatic recognition.
Texas annexation had remained a political landmine since the Texas Republic declared independence from Mexico in 1836. In the final days of his presidency, President Tyler at last extended an official offer to Texas on March 3, 1845. The republic accepted on July 4, becoming the twenty-eighth state, and one in which the institution of Slavery was legal.
Mexico denounced annexation as “an act of aggression, the most unjust which can be found recorded in the annals of modern history.” Beyond the anger produced by annexation, the two nations both laid claim over a narrow strip of land between two rivers. Mexico drew the southwestern border of Texas at the Nueces River, but Texans claimed that the border lay roughly 150 miles farther west at the Rio Grande. Neither claim was realistic since the sparsely populated area, known as the Nueces strip, was in fact controlled by Native Americans.
In the early fall of 1846, the U.S. Army invaded Mexico on multiple fronts and within a year’s time General Winfield Scott’s men took control of Mexico City. Peace finally came on February 2, 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The United States gained lands that would become the future states of California, Utah, and Nevada; most of Arizona; and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. Mexican officials would also have to surrender their claims to Texas and recognize the Rio Grande as its southern boundary. The United States offered $15 million for all of it. With American soldiers occupying their capital, Mexican leaders had no choice but to sign.
Despite guarantees to the contrary in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexicans who were living in the territories ceded to the United States often lost rights and property as Anglo-Americans came in and demanded adherence to U.S. racial hierarchies. While Mexico had ended slavery and enshrined racial equality into its constitution, the new nation these Mexican-Americans now resided had not.
The Gold Rush
On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall, a contractor hired by John Sutter, discovered gold on Sutter’s sawmill land in the Sacramento Valley area of the California Territory. Most western settlers sought land ownership, but the lure of getting rich quickly drew younger single men (with some women) to gold towns throughout the West. These adventurers and fortune-seekers then served as magnets for the arrival of others providing services associated with the gold rush. Towns and cities grew rapidly throughout the West, notably San Francisco, whose population grew from about five hundred in 1848 to almost fifty thousand by 1853.
California, belonging to Mexico prior to the war, was at least three arduous months’ travel from the nearest U.S. settlements. Dramatized stories of Native American attacks filled migrants with a sense of foreboding, although most settlers encountered no violence and often no Native Americans at all. The slow progress, disease, human and oxen starvation, poor trails, terrible geographic preparations, lack of guidebooks, threatening wildlife, bad weather, and general confusion were all more deadly and frequent than attacks from Native Americans. In contrast, these settlers carried out a genocidal campaign—defined by the United Nations as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group—against Native populations in the West in the decades following the Mexican-American War. Between the mid and late 19th century, Western state governments—backed by policymakers in Washington—funded militias that hunted and killed Native people, while policies like the Indian Removal Act, boarding schools, and broken treaties sought to systematically erase Native identities and communities.
In addition to large numbers of eastern migrants, Irish and German immigrants and remaining native communities, by the end of the 1850s, Chinese and Mexicans made up one-fifth of the mining population in California. The ethnic patchwork of these frontier towns belied a clearly defined socioeconomic arrangement that saw whites on top as landowners and managers, with poor/immigrant whites and ethnic minorities working the mines and assorted jobs. The competition for land, resources, and riches furthered individual and collective abuses, particularly against Native Americans and older Mexican communities as California had been a part of Mexico a decade earlier. California’s towns, as well as those dotting the landscape throughout the West, struggled to balance security with economic development and the protection of civil rights and liberties.
Chinese immigrant communities developing along the West Coast in the mid-19th century repeatedly saw their enclaves attacked, their homes and shops burned down, their residency revoked, and their fellow immigrants murdered. These nascent communities faced systemic violence, most often carried out by economically insecure white laborers—many of them Irish immigrants—who had been pitted against Chinese workers by mining bosses and railroad companies.
Though both the Irish and Chinese were exploited, they were divided by the privileges they held in their adopted home. Irish immigrants, as white Europeans, could eventually become naturalized citizens. Chinese immigrants, on the other hand, were excluded from this possibility by the Naturalization Act of 1790, which reserved citizenship for white applicants only. The whiteness of the Irish granted them a path to legal and social inclusion; Chinese immigrants, regardless of time spent in the country, were denied that same future.
Because the Page Act of 1875 effectively barred Chinese women from immigrating to the United States—and anti-miscegenation laws prohibited Chinese men from legally marrying white women—few U.S.-born Chinese children could claim citizenship under the 14th Amendment’s birthright clause, ratified only a few years earlier. With little legal recourse and often barred from testifying against their white abusers in court, many Chinese immigrants fled to the relative safety of Eastern cities like New York. Yet even there, they continued to endure structural violence and legal discrimination, including exclusionary laws that lasted until World War II.
By the end of the 19th century, the U.S. government had legally cemented the status of Chinese immigrants as vulnerable laborers, subject to exploitation by employers and manipulation by policymakers. Politicians, meanwhile, looked the other way as the very community they helped to demonize became the target of violent scapegoating. In doing so, they ensured that the rage of the white working class was directed not at the capitalist class that profited off their labor, but at fellow working-class workers —particularly the Chinese—who had even fewer rights.
