Immigration

 

Immigration to the United States experienced an unprecedented upswing from the 1840s to the 1850s. This trend reached a peak in 1854, when more than 400,000 immigrants arrived seeking new opportunities in America. Many of these immigrants were of Irish or German descent, and faced many challenges. Although the cartoon depicted above was published some time after the end of the Civil War, it still depicts an attitude prevalent earlier in the 19th century. Americans were originally overwhelming protestant, and many were concerned by the arrival of large numbers of Roman Catholics from Ireland and Germany.  

Political and religious turmoil in Ireland, plus a stereotypical association with alcohol abuse and hooliganism, stuck the Irish with a poor reputation amongst many Americans. This attitude was also influenced by a demographic shift among Irish immigrants that began around the mid-century: Before this point, most Irish Catholic immigrants had been upper-class farmers and middle-class city-dwellers. However, due to the increasing difficulty of living conditions in Ireland following the Potato Blight of the 1840s, this balance began to shift towards the extremely-poor. These new immigrants flooded to the United States in search of a better life.

Irish immigrants clung to their Roman Catholicism in much the same way they had in the face of the British protestant rule in their homeland. Irish immigrants in the state of New York refused to send their children to public schools that used the King James Version of the Bible. This sparked a controversy that would lead to the creation of the American Republican Party, in 1843.

Germans actually arrived in the United States in equal or greater numbers than the Irish, though they were not quite as maligned as this other group. Germans were mostly encouraged to immigrate to the United States due to economic pressure from industrialization and overcrowding in the German states, which at this point in history were very many, very small, and very disunited. Many German immigrants were Catholics, like their Irish counterparts, and as the cartoon shows, also associated with a penchant for drunkenness. However, they were slightly less maligned than this other immigrant group: Germans were seen as skilled workers, who came to the United States with more resources and skills than the destitute Irish. Having more money also gave them the freedom to leave the cities and contribute to the settlement of the west - unlike the Irish, who were forced to congregate in the cities of the east coast. Many of them settled in midwestern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee, where they came to make up a majority of the population to this day.

Also like their Irish counterparts, Germans in the United States became politically active. Germans who had fled their homelands after the failed liberal, republican revolutions of 1848, took a particularly strong interest in the concepts of citizenship and individual rights, which may explain why they were seen to be "running away with the ballot box" in the cartoon. This attitude would also extend itself to the debate over slavery, where German abolitionism did not take a religious attitude, but a political one. Antislavery in the midwest was strongly supported by people of German descent, who held neither an economic stake in the institution of slavery nor political or social sympathies towards slaveholders.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 led the vast majority of the German community to join the newborn Republican Party.