Immigration

In the first great wave of 19th-century immigration, about 5 million people entered the United States between 1820 and 1860. Nearly 1.6 million were natives of Ireland, and 1.5 million more were from Germany. During the 1820s, the Irish and Germans accounted for more than 40 percent of immigrants; in the 1830s, they accounted for approximately 60 percent; and in the 1840s and 1850s, they made up more than 70 percent of immigrants. English immigrants accounted for 15 percent or less of the total. Small numbers of Scandinavian and Canadian immigrants also entered the United States during the time. Approximately 80,000 Mexicans became U. S. residents during the mid-19th century, but not through immigration. Instead, they gained the rights of American citizens following the American absorption of Texas and much of the American Southwest (comprising modern-day California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Wyoming, and Colorado) following the Mexican-American War (1846-48). These lands were ceded in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico. Also in the late 1840s, some 25,000 Chinese immigrants arrived during the California gold rush and established residence.

Necessity and opportunity were the primary driving forces for immigration. From the 1830s, declining economic conditions led Irish farmers to emigrate to the United States. During the mid-1840s, the numbers of immigrants increased sharply after potato blights destroyed Ireland’s primary source of food and commerce. Compounding the problem was the treatment of farmers by the landowners. Although dairy products and other foodstuffs were raised successfully in Ireland, they were used mainly for export to England. This left tenant farmers dependent on potatoes, and when those rotted from blight, many starved. One million of Ireland’s 8 million inhabitants died of hunger and other related conditions during this time. One quarter of those remaining eventually immigrated to the United States, in what became known as the Great Migration.

For Germans, economic necessity and failed revolutionary movements in 1830 and 1848 led them to migrate to North America. So many thousands came to the U. S. after the failures of the 1848 European revolutions that they were known as Forty-Eighters. As they had been for decades, peasants and artisans were also solicited by U. S. labor agents, who offered work in a rapidly industrializing country. Agents further enticed potential immigrants with the chance to own inexpensive land in the West. For many European Jews, the United States also offered a chance to escape religious discrimination.

Other Europeans became immigrants for economic reasons. Certain factors were common to all these groups; industrialization and commercial agriculture played important roles. As the large-scale practices of commercial agriculture increased during the early 19th century, small farmers throughout Europe were unable to support themselves. Similarly, the low-cost, factory-made products that industrialization brought to the market ended the livelihood of many European craftsmen. A further stimulus to migrate to the United States was the low cost of steamboat transportation, which made the transoceanic trip possible.

One characteristic of migration was its growth as the 19th century progressed. During the 1820s, 152,000 immigrants entered the United States, which had a population in 1820 of 9.6 million. The 1830 population was 12.9 million, and in the decade that followed, 599,000 immigrants entered the country. The population in 1840 was 17 million; 1,713,000 immigrants entered during the next 10 years. By 1850, the population was 23.2 million; that decade saw the entry of 2,598,000 immigrants. In the 1820s, slightly more than one of every 1,000 U. S. residents was a new immigrant; in the 1850s, it was more than nine of every 1,000. Immigrant Irish brought New York City unprecedented increases in numbers, accounting for 343,000 of the city’s 1850 population of 515,547. Overall, the millions of

This engraving shows Irish emigrants getting ready to leave their famine-stricken homeland for the United States. (Library of Congress)

Immigrants and a fertile young populace combined to make the United States grow more quickly than any other nation during the 19th century, increasing from 5 million to about 31 million between 1800 and 1860.

The boat voyage that brought immigrants to North America was lengthy and hazardous, usually taking place aboard a steamer (known to Irish immigrants as a “coffin ship”) that was overcrowded and invited disease. In 1832, Irish immigrants carried cholera aboard ship to Canada and through to New York, resulting in hundreds of deaths. Most of these and other Irish immigrants were young (under 35 years old) and without money, traveling in small groups or alone. Other family members came when the new immigrant was able to raise funds. In contrast, most German immigrants traveled as families, and, at least with the early groups, had more money. From 1849, most European immigrants entering New York passed through a receiving station called Castle Garden, in lower Manhattan.

Immigrants from all countries adopted various methods to adjust to an unfamiliar land. From friends and relatives, they learned about the country and of relatively hospitable regions. Although both Irish and German groups settled in northeastern coastal cities, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, some settlers moved into the nation’s midsection to work on canals, railroads, and roads. Eventually, many German immigrants settled widely across the United States, establishing farms and homes in the Ohio Valley, along the Mississippi River to Missouri, within the Great Lakes region in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and in Texas. More than 950,000 Germans migrated to the United States during the 1850s. So great and varied was German settlement that its well-populated states formed a continuous line from New York to Minnesota known as the “German Belt.” Only one in eight of all new immigrants entered the cotton-dominated South.

Once arrived, new immigrants turned to formal and informal ethnic networks that provided information and leads for housing and jobs. Although most colonial-era Irish and German immigrants were Protestants, those arriving during the 19th century were largely Roman Catholics who looked to the church for social support. Ethnic newspapers and social clubs, particularly those for German immigrants, also provided community support.

Types of work and working conditions varied among these immigrants. Although there were some skilled craftsmen, professionally trained people, and intellectuals in the immigrant mix who became artists, journalists, shopkeepers, and political leaders, most immigrants were former farmers and manual laborers. This was particularly true among Irish immigrants. Along the eastern coastal cities, laborers found work (much of it day labor) in construction sites, factories, canals, railroads, or textile mills. Given their need for labor, textile mills were favored sites of employment for Irish immigrant families, since they provided ready sources of work for entire families that needed money. Female Irish immigrants, however, were often subjected to faster work paces and lower pay rates than their native-born counterparts. Some Irish immigrant women were also employed at home doing piecework or as domestic servants. As one journalist wrote in 1860, “There are several sorts of power working at the fabric of this Republic: water-power, steam-power, horse-power, Irish-power. The last works hardest of all.” German immigrants were more likely to work in light industry or crafts work, which utilized their earlier training as artisans. Other immigrants of the era from England, Canada, or elsewhere were less likely to take jobs as domestic servants or day laborers. Instead, they worked as farmers, in construction, or in higher-level machinery work.

Over time, immigrant groups also developed various social and cultural specialties that allowed them to enrich and be integrated into the American way of life. German immigrants became known for their ability to provide various types of entertainment, which spanned the popular venues of dance halls and beer gardens to choral and classical music. For example, in 1835 German immigrants founded the first U. S. vocal music society, the Maenner-chor (Men’s Choir); in later decades, they led in the formation of musical societies in other cities. German immigrants were also central to bringing classical music to the United States; in 1855, an early conductor of the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra was German immigrant Carl Bergmann.

Many Irish immigrants developed a political expertise that won them local and statewide positions. (President Andrew Jackson was the son of Irish immigrants who arrived before the Great Migration.) They were able to establish voting blocs and infiltrate traditionally English and old-immigrant neighborhoods.

From the 1830s through the 1850s, the influx of 2.2 million immigrants, many of them destitute and Roman Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation, roused deep anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States. Most earlier Irish immigrants were Protestants from northern Ireland and thus easily accepted into American society. Newly arrived German Roman Catholic immigrants held beliefs that were more agreeable with prevailing northern thinking, such as participation in public schools. Pro-Union, in later years they were instrumental in the presidential victory of Abraham Lincoln. Additionally, when they arrived in the United States, German immigrants often had more money than their Irish counterparts and possessed greater training for skilled work.

These anti-immigrant attitudes, which represented the first large-scale nativist movement in U. S. history, were manifested in many ways. Newspaper postings for work and housing often included the catchphrase “Nina”—“No Irish Need Apply.” Beginning in the 1830s, periodicals featured warnings of “popish” plots for the Catholic appropriation of the nation. One notable anti-Catholic spokesman was Samuel F. B. Morse. Now best known for his invention of the telegraph, he was famous then for his 1834 series of letters, A Foreign Cons-piracy Against the Liberties of the United States.

Violent demonstrations of anti-Catholic opinion occurred throughout the period of the Great Migration, usually in cities with large immigrant populations. One

Immigration to the United States, 1830-60

Prolonged argument centered on the ongoing Irish objection to using the Protestant King James Bible in public schools and one school board’s response to it. In 1844 the Philadelphia school system exempted Catholics from using Protestant-leaning textbooks and permitted the use of the Catholic Douay version of the Bible. In response, Protestant and Catholic rallies and demonstrations erupted and resulted in two riots, ending in 30 deaths, 150 injuries, and the destruction of two Catholic churches. It was the most violent religious confrontation in the United States to date. In the 1850s ANTI-CATHOLIC riots occurred in Boston and elsewhere.

Anti-immigrant forces also attempted to control immigration and immigrants’ rights through political means, forming various political parties to promote their goals. In 1837 the Native American Association was founded to counter nonnative groups, particularly Catholics; its formal political party, the Native America Party, was founded in 1845. Also organized to curtail immigrant rights was the American Republican Party, founded in 1843. Its goal was to prevent immigrants from holding elected office. Most influential nationally was the American Party, more commonly known as the KNOW-NOTHING Party. Founded in mid-century as memories of the bloody 1844 Philadelphia riots faded, the Know-Nothing Party aimed to bar immigrants and any Catholic from public office. Affiliated with this party was Millard Fillmore, who became president following the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850.

In the West during the gold rush, Chinese immigrants faced what would in later decades become escalating discrimination. As prospectors, they were granted access only to gold claims already examined by white prospectors.

Nativist movements and focus on anti-immigration diminished at the end of the 1850s as conflicts escalated between the North and the South. Immigrants were needed to defend the Union; thousands did, serving in many Irish-and German-immigrant divisions. Their participation in the Union army during the Civil War was important to the Northern triumph. Among notable Irish commanders were General Philip Sheridan and immigrant General Thomas Francis Meagher, leader of a Union Irish brigade. German immigrant Civil War generals included Carl Schurz, who later worked for President Lincoln. Such soldiers helped to contribute to the assimilation of all 19th-century immigrants into the United States.

Despite adversity, immigrants who arrived between 1820 and 1860 would be the last group to have relative freedom from immigration laws. The second wave of immigrants, who would arrive between 1880 and 1920, would face more stringent legislation, beginning with an 1862 law prohibiting American ships from bringing Chinese immigrants to the United States. Such legal measures would increase in scope throughout the century. Still, the immigration surge that began in the early 19th century continued to grow until World War I, seeing its largest number of arrivals—20 million—during the highly regulated period of 1880 to 1920.

Further reading: Louis Adamic, A Nation of Nations (New York and London: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1945); American Social History Project, Who Built America: Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989-92); Stephen A. Flanders, Atlas of American Migration (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 1998).

—Melinda Corey